


To Resist Both Wind and Tide

by Frea_O



Series: The Fatesverse [2]
Category: Chuck (TV)
Genre: Bunker, D&D, Dreams, F/M, Russia, Skydiving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-30
Updated: 2011-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-28 12:17:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/307801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frea_O/pseuds/Frea_O
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah Walker wants nothing more to relax and enjoy a mindless vacation with Bryce in Cabo, but Bryce has other ideas. Instead, Sarah gets 48 hours in a bunker in the middle of freaking Siberia, but when she meets Chuck...she find she doesn't mind as much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Wisest Course

Let me embrace thee, sour adversity,  
for wise men say it is the wisest course.  
\- _William Shakespeare,_ **King Henry VI, Part III**

 **17 NOVEMBER 2005  
OVER SIBERIA, UNDISCLOSED COORDINATES  
06:58 OMST**

Above Sarah Walker’s head, the light turned red.

She didn’t look up to acknowledge. That would require glancing across the small plane—the small, unregistered plane, as they didn’t exactly have overt permission to fly through Russian airspace, but the pilot was apparently a friend—and meeting Bryce Larkin’s eyes. Since she was currently nursing a nice fury toward him, and he had an uncanny ability to defuse her temper, she had spent most of the long, grueling journey staring at a fixed point and ignoring everything around her. This was Bryce’s folly. Let him deal with the damned details.

She should be in Cabo right now. There should be a blood orange margarita in her hand, she should be wearing the new bikini she’d bought special for the trip, and for once, not thinking about whatever it was Uncle Sam wanted her to think about. It had been two damn long years since she’d had a proper vacation. She should be on one now.

Instead, she huddled into a new parka that rubbed the wrong way against her neck, waiting to skydive into the wilds of Siberia, of all places.

And why the hell was that? Bryce wanted to visit an old college buddy.

She considered not speaking to him ever again, except for work. Apparently, the incident in Barcelona, after they’d taken out the corrupt oil magnate, and the incredibly hot, steamy interlude in the shower after he’d almost been killed by a zealot warlord in the Congo meant absolutely nothing, if he was willing to blow off a trip to Cabo—and all of the implications that went with said trip—for visiting an old classmate, of all things.

He’d tried to talk the guy up during the first flight. All the way to Amsterdam, it had been, “Chuck’s a great guy, you’ll really like him,” and “Did I tell you about the time Chuck and I built a robot that could…”

Great guy or not, this Chuck was getting in the way of Sarah Walker’s first vacation in a long, long time. A vacation with sex. Great sex, to boot.

She hated Chuck Bartowski already, and she hadn’t even laid eyes on him.

Something nudged her foot. Sarah kept her body under rigid control at all times, so she didn’t react. Inwardly, she just cursed her annoyance for getting in the way of her need to be alert, and rose to her feet. Bryce, across from her, did the same thing. Though they’d never had a problem maneuvering together in close environments before, Sarah shut him down with a look when she felt he was moving in too close to her personal space. He flashed her an unrepentant grin as he held both hands up in surrender.

“We’re almost there!” he called over the engine noise. “Want to go first?”

“You should, you have a better idea where the damned bunker is.”

Sarah shoved away the little voice in the back of her head that wondered why one of Bryce’s college buddies would even be in a bunker. That voice was something she listened to only when she felt in danger, as it had saved her quite a few times before. And since she wasn’t in danger right now, she’d ignore it and focus on being angry.

Bryce moved up to the position by the door. “Are you sure you’re going to jump? You’re not going to stay in the plane and just leave me hanging, are you?”

“If I said I’ll jump, I’m going to jump, damn it. I’ve already come this far, haven’t I?” She clipped her words intentionally, hoping that they might give him frostbite if she could infuse as much icy anger into them as possible.

No such luck. Bryce was good at ignoring her moods. It made him a great partner and a damned irritation at the same time.

Since she couldn’t shoot him in Russian airspace without paperwork, Sarah decided she’d just not notice the laughing grin he gave her. She focused on one last check of her gear—a pared down version of what they usually preferred to jump with, as they likely weren’t facing any hostiles on this trip (why Bryce would carry an extra pack, she had no idea)—before turning to buddy-check Bryce without meeting his gaze. He did the same thing.

“It’s a pretty narrow jump window,” he explained, for the second time. Inwardly, Sarah rolled her eyes. She had a damned near photographic memory, didn’t she? Why did Bryce continually forget that? “So stay right on my ass.”

Sarah ignored all of the things she’d been hoping to do to Bryce’s ass in Cabo in order to bring up the currently more preferable image of kicking said ass. She gave Bryce a smile that had bite. “Uh-huh. Heard you the first time.”

“You ready?”

She gave him a silent nod.

“You’ll really like Chuck, I promise. He’s a good guy. One of the best.”

She couldn’t care less.

When the jump light over their heads turned green, Bryce didn’t pause to give her his usual pre-jump grin, the one that always made her silly heart kick up a notch. He simply launched himself out into the cold open.

Sarah took a deep breath and followed.

Like most agents, she enjoyed skydiving into assignments. You didn’t go into field work because you had a decent, stable home-life waiting for you to clock out at five o’clock and pick up dinner on the way home. In fact, only a government title separated most agents from those they were supposed to arrest. And field agents were the worst: adrenaline junkies, pure and simple. The good ones were just luckier or had noticed that one small detail during a mission or in everyday life, no matter how obscure, that could save their lives. Sarah hoped she would be one of the good ones.

She studied the landscape as she fell, letting the excitement and terror and sheer brilliance of the freefall course through her. Her mind automatically categorized anything that might be helpful at some point: landmarks like any nearby towns, streams, lakes, the terrain, temperature (bitterly cold, which only made her more annoyed at being cheated of Cabo). She knew parts of Siberia were supposed to be beautiful, but what they dropped over now was completely bleak.

The little voice wondered what sort of assignment Bryce’s friend had pulled, that he would be stuck in this sort of thankless environment all the time?

Slightly below her, to her left, Bryce opened his chute.

Sarah silenced the voice and deliberately relaxed her body before she yanked the cord. The jerk still caught her, but not as hard, as the chute opened with a _whoomph_. The pilot hadn’t been able to get them right over the bunker—something about airspace restrictions that she hadn’t paid a lick of attention to—so they would have to make the final leg of the trip on snowshoe. She was already exhausted—the lowered oxygen in flight would always do her in—but she’d worked with worse. She’d trekked miles through the desert with two fractured ribs, hadn’t she? Carina hadn’t been much help on that particular assignment, as she’d been too busy trying to get them both killed, but they’d made it in the end, against all expectations. A few kilometers on snowshoe with travel fatigue was nothing compared to that.

She followed Bryce down, guiding her parachute with the ease of practice and repetition. Jumping inevitably made her think of those hellish weeks in Georgia, even though she’d only done two jumps with the steerable chute. She’d been Sandra then, Lieutenant Sandra Williamson, open, charming, fresh out of ROTC from a school nobody had heard of in Missouri, and an instant hit during the nightly poker games. Sarah had quite liked being Sandra, despite the long, grueling days of training in the soupy Georgia humidity.

Of course, Sandra Williamson had vanished off of the face of the earth when Sarah Walker, jump wings shiny and stored in a safety deposit box in Wyoming that nobody but herself knew about, had returned from “vacation.”

The ground rushed at her, of course. It always seemed so distant until the last hundred feet or so, once she’d cleared the trees. At that moment, training took over. She loosened her body, tucking and rolling just as she’d been taught. It was more or less a textbook maneuver, softened by the snow. About two hundred feet away, Bryce executed a perfect landing, just like always. Sarah scanned the landscape as she yanked the parachute in, stuffing quickly. The area was so desolate that rapidly policing their drop zone probably didn’t hold as much importance as it would have in a hot zone, but they both raced through the motions, even hip-deep in snow. Sarah unsnapped her snowshoes, stepped into them, and yanked the retractable ski-poles from her pack in one smooth motion.

She jogged the distance to Bryce, adjusting her balance to compensate for the snowshoes within only a few strides. It had been too long since that brief jaunt to Switzerland.

Together, they hurried for the trees.

It took less than a minute to vanish fully from sight. Once they were under cover, they paused momentarily to set up their gear, clipping the dormant beacons into their parkas, adjusting their facemasks and goggles. Though it pained her to run with so much covering her visibility, the cold had seeped in already—only a brisk pace would really push it back. So Sarah was prepared to keep up pace.

Bryce locked his GPS watch just under his parka cuff. “It’s about eleven klicks and change,” he said, frowning at the read-out. “Will you be all right with that?”

What was eleven kilometers through heavy snow when she could be sipping a damned margarita on a beach chair and listening to the waves crash? Sarah checked to make sure her S&W was tucked deep into her vest, where her body heat would keep it warm. She doubted the temperature around them was cold enough to cause problems during such a short exposure, but as an unwelcome presence in a friendly-yet-uncertain territory, she wasn’t willing to risk a thing. Maybe she should just shoot Bryce right now, trek to the nearest train station, and go to Cabo anyway.

“I’ll be fine,” she said instead, adjusting the wrist straps for her ski poles. “What time is your friend expecting us?”

Bryce pulled his goggles on, adjusting the strap so that it fit over his ski-cap. “Ah, yeah. About that…”

Sarah glared. “You mean, you didn’t even tell your friend we’re just randomly dropping in on him?”

“It’s supposed to be a surprise.”

“Some surprise,” Sarah muttered under her breath. “Maybe you should’ve just had him meet us. In _Cabo_!”

Of course, she wasn’t sure how she’d feel about one of Bryce’s old college buddies crashing what was supposed to be an exclusive vacation, one filled with a lot of foreplay and a lot more of what followed. And dammit, she had been looking forward to what followed. No dangerous situations, no shaky-kneed-Thank-God-We-Didn’t-Die-Now-Let’s-Screw urgency. Just two hard-bodied spies, a bunch of lazy hours on a beach towel, in a bed, hell, even in the Jacuzzi if they preferred.

“I barely got permission to go visit _him_ ,” Bryce told her, drawing her thoughts back to the blistering cold reality of present. “C’mon, Sarah, he’s stuck in a bunker doing government work. Let’s go give the guy a thrill, okay?”

Sarah gave one final thought to a sex-and-sun-filled-trip, and sighed. “Fine. Lay on, Macduff.”

“Oh, Shakespeare,” Bryce said, laughing as they set out. “Nice. Sure you’re still blonde under that hood?”

Sarah muttered something under her breath. If it sounded like “Thou poisonous bunch-back’d toad,” well, she could always claim coincidence. Thankfully, Bryce didn’t seem to hear her. He was too busy struggling with the snow. Even with their speed snowshoes, crafted to be lightweight and good for most any type of snow, it was going to be a long, cold walk to Chuck Bartowski.

 **17 NOVEMBER 2005  
.8 KLICKS FROM BUNKER 77142135  
12:14 OMST**

“That’s odd.” Sarah forgot she currently wasn’t speaking to her partner. When they were alone, and they noticed something off, it was a requirement to speak up. That was just the way it was.  
He glanced back from where he was studying the horizon for trouble. “What is?”

“The sensor. You’re sure it’s the only one?”

“That’s what the schematics Digital Dave gave me said. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know.” Sarah sat back on her haunches, her snowshoes crunching a little on the snow as she did so. It hadn’t taken her long to deactivate the sensor in a way that wouldn’t alert the bunker’s occupant. Bryce had insisted. He wanted the whole thing to be a surprise, and if they tripped the sensor, the surprise might be all theirs, as Chuck might be waiting for them with a gun. Sarah was personally of the opinion that there was going to be gunplay involved either way, unless this friend of Bryce’s really didn’t care about security at all.

“It feels off,” she said, indicating the sensor panel. She’d dismantled it easily, which spoke more of the unit’s shoddiness rather than her own skill. “Too easy to tamper with. We should stay alert—I probably missed something.”

Though she doubted it. She was Sarah Walker, Langston Graham’s pet pupil. She might not have been the brightest (though she came close), the fastest, or the best, but she was thorough, and she had a memory that could put geniuses to shame. She hadn’t missed anything.

Bryce, for once, seemed to remember that. He nodded, dubiously. “All right. We’ll work from there. If not, well, Chuck’s a nice guy. I doubt he’s going to ambush us. I’ll go first, just to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“My hero,” Sarah muttered, sarcasm dripping.

She pushed off the exhaustion as they set out again, the level of alertness raised by the fact that they might be walking into an ambush. A little jetlag on top of a broken sleep pattern was nothing compared to what the top agents usually handled, even if it was so cold that she felt the few millimeters of exposed skin between her goggles and her facemask were going to blister. She really shouldn’t have bitched so much about going into the desert all the time. She knew that memories faded pain and discomfort, but any place on the planet would be better than this mind-numbing cold. So she focused on not slobbering on her facemask, and keeping up with Bryce’s pace. The cold, of course, made her hate Bryce Larkin and Chuck Bartowski all over again.

She’d never known hatred could be so comforting.

When the bunker came into sight, just a flat, unassuming building (very small building, she noted), Bryce glanced over his shoulder to grin at her. She rolled her eyes in reply.

The entrance into the bunker turned out to face the east, an overhang that kept snow from overwhelming the tunnel. It led downward at a sharp angle, telling Sarah that most of the bunker existed underground. They paused at the mouth to strip out of the snowshoes and facemasks, stowing everything neatly in their packs. Sarah surreptitiously checked her gun. Chuck might be a friend of Bryce’s, but she had no idea what sort of effect such complete isolation would have on him.

She hoped it hadn’t driven the guy crazy. She’d really hate to put a bullet in her partner’s friend.

“Your friend better have hot cocoa in there,” she warned Bryce as they shouldered their packs once more. After hours on snowshoes, it took a moment of adjustment to walk in her snow boots.

“And coffee,” Bryce agreed, insanely cheerful after having moved over eleven kilometers of heavy snow. “Hold on just a second, I have to make a call.”

He pulled out a satellite phone and stepped out of hearing range. Sarah frowned after him. What was going on now? Was this some sort of elaborate prank?

But when Bryce came back a couple of minutes later, he had no explanation. He just jerked his head to indicate that Sarah should follow him to the bunker door, and knocked. He had to knock twice more.

“Chuck!” Bryce called when there was no answer. He shot Sarah a confused look; she shrugged and tried to hide her aggravation. If they’d come all this way for nothing, well, she could always just steal Bryce’s satellite phone to get back after she severed three major arteries and left him bleeding in the snow. Bryce pounded on the door again, obviously unaware of his partner’s murderous bent. “C’mon, Chuck! Open up!”

Sarah’s ears picked up the hesitant sound of boots on concrete. Then slap of somebody running, and the hurried motions of a door being unlocked. It opened with a groan. “Bryce!”

Though it wasn’t terribly bright in the tunnel, the man in the bunker immediately threw up a hand over his eyes, blocking most of his face, from Sarah’s view. She picked up other details in a heartbeat, though. He was tall—taller than Bryce and herself, and she was pretty tall for a woman. In fact, he was so tall that he stooped forward automatically to avoid hitting his head on the bunker ceiling. Sarah got a better look at his face when he hugged Bryce.

Her eyebrows went up as Bryce greeted his friend. He was bunker pale, yes, but she’d expected an unkempt, ragged appearance, rather than the clean-shaven visage presented to her. He’d even cut his hair into a military buzz-cut.

He still hadn’t noticed her, which was okay. That gave her a moment more to categorize build—a build that didn’t match the face, which was on the thin side—mannerisms, and even the way Bryce’s body language changed completely. A real friend, Sarah realized.

“Yeah, like two minutes ago,” Chuck Bartowski told Bryce, answering his question. “How did you—you pulled some strings, didn’t you?” He didn’t sound surprised in the slightest by that, which meant he had more than some familiarity with Bryce Larkin’s inherent superpowers. “Come in, come in, it’s cold out there!”

She saw the exact instant he noticed her. Because her eyes were much better adjusted to the light levels, she saw the dilation of his pupils, the way he straightened his shoulders, the shift in his stance. It was probably, the cynical side of her pointed out, the first time he’d seen a woman in forever. That explained the severity of the reaction.

It wasn’t personal.

“Oh,” was all he said. She raised an eyebrow as she brushed by, eager to get into the bunker and out of the cold.

It wasn’t all that much warmer inside. And “confined” didn’t even begin to describe it. Sarah took a deep breath, calming herself before the inevitable claustrophobia could start in. She wouldn’t call it an outright phobia, her dislike of small spaces, but the lack of room immediately pressed against her mind, added to the dimmed lighting, and the concrete décor.

It was going to be a _long_ forty-eight hours. Again, she thought of Cabo. This time, however, she just wished that Chuck had been able to get away from this place and join them there. Nobody should be put through this.

He, however, didn’t seem at all bothered by the small space. “How’d you two get by the perimeter? The alarm never went off.”

Because it was a piece of crap, Sarah thought, fighting the urge to yawn. The travel fatigue was catching up to her already? Maybe the tight space and dim lighting were weighing on her.

“That was all Sarah,” Bryce said, as was custom. He liked deflecting all of the praise to Sarah and taking all of the blame, which was fine and good and all until the reality of having a martyr for a partner began to drag on you. “Sarah, this is Chuck Bartowski, the best wingman a guy could have. Chuck, my partner, Sarah.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Chuck said. He extended a hand around Bryce.

She had to move her bag back to shake his hand. Her hand was clammy and frozen from all of those hours in the cold, which meant that Chuck’s hand felt gloriously warm when it wrapped briefly around hers. Beneath her parka and the four layers below it, something shivered down her spine. She dropped his hand quickly and stuck hers back in her pocket. “Likewise.”

Had Bryce noticed her reaction? She hadn’t hidden it as well as she’d have liked. So she covered, her voice intentionally dispassionate, “Um, is there somewhere we can put our bags? It’s been a long day.”

Bryce lifted an eyebrow. Sarah glared at him. She was cold, damnit. That was all.

“Right,” Chuck said, clearing his throat. He gave them both a sheepish look. “Good point. Let me give you the tour, show you where you can drop your stuff. Though I warn you, it’ll be a short tour.”

He wasn’t lying, Sarah saw very, very quickly. This was his entire world? She let Bryce and Chuck’s conversation drift over her as she studied the area, automatically marking distances and spatial relationships in her head just in case they would come in handy later. Yeah, right, Sarah, when ninjas attack the bunker, she heard Bryce tease in her head. She chose to ignore that and glared at him when Chuck asked how long they were planning to stay.

Given the choice between Cabo and a throwback to Cold War, she’d still take Cabo, after all.

When Chuck asked about possible claustrophobia, she bit her lip, surprised when she wanted to actually answer that question with any modicum of honestly. What the hell?

Okay, so maybe she felt bad for the guy. He’d obviously drawn the short straw in government duty. He must be a whiz at Russian to be stuck out here, in the middle of nowhere, like the government’s greatest secret.

The government’s greatest secret also apparently had the diet of a five-year-old. Sarah wanted to roll her eyes when Bryce finally revealed the contents of the mystery pack. He’d come bearing gifts for his friend: a heart attack in a can. Spaghetti-Os? Really, Bryce? She asked the last question silently as she stowed her pack underneath the bunk next to Bryce’s in the confined space.

Because the idiot always seemed to know her thoughts, whether he acknowledged it or not, Bryce just grinned over at her.

They ended up in the kitchen, the roomiest area in the entire bunker (although the bunk room was the only room where Chuck Bartowski could stand without stooping). Sarah tried not to sag back in her chair, holding herself upright only by sheer force of will. Maybe the journey had taken more out of her than she had thought, but it felt unusual to be this tired when she hadn’t been in a gunfight, knife-fight (her favorite), or even a hand-to-hand battle. Of course, the fact that they had parachuted in, followed by a not-so-easy jog through eleven kilometers of waist-deep snow, after hours of planes, trains, and automobiles—added together, it more than explained her weariness. But she’d thought she had more gas in the tank, so to speak.

So she let Bryce do most of the talking. Besides, she wasn’t even sure they were even using English. She could converse in as many dialects as she put her mind to, but the way the two nerds in the kitchen with her were tossing around words like “Yoda” and “Yoshi,” “Dalek,” and “Harkonnen,” maybe it was just better to let it go. She sipped the powdered cocoa Chuck had made and focused on keeping her eyes open.

When Chuck demanded stories of their adventures, Sarah shared a brief look with Bryce, but continued to let him do the talking. He always made their adventures sound more exciting, anyway. Whenever she told a story, Bryce claimed it sounded like a post-op briefing. But damn it, at least she could tell that post-op briefing comfortably in five languages, and competently in three more. She’d like to see Wonder Boy Bryce do that.

A couple of times during his stories—his edited and exaggerated stories—Bryce nudged her with a foot, and she realized that her eyelids were starting to droop. She felt bad. Chuck was pretty much the perfect audience for Bryce. He was joking and attentive by turns, hanging onto every word spoken with an enthusiasm she didn’t see much anymore. And even when Bryce exaggerated her own abilities into the realms of unrealism, Chuck didn’t once give her a disbelieving look. He just accepted that she could single-handedly take out a cabal of renegades that had pinned her and Bryce down in South America. Not once did he scoff, demand “ _Her_? Really?” or even crack a blonde joke.

Okay, so maybe she didn’t hate Chuck Bartowski after all.

When Bryce launched into his rendition of the Paraguay story, Sarah rolled her eyes. They’d had reports from Graham that new recruits _still_ told this story around the mess tables at the Farm, though thankfully Sarah’s name had been removed early on. That poor, stupid goat. Their first mission in South America and not only had Bryce missed a drop-point thanks to tequila with the _amigos_ , but she’d had the pleasure of escaping naked from an armed manor, and in the end, using only livestock to protect her assets. It was all Bryce’s fault.

Though she had gotten to take down quite a few armed men with nothing more than Krav Maga and her wits. So there was something to be learned from the situation. Even a naked Sarah Walker is a badass Sarah Walker? Men certainly seemed to think so.

And Chuck rather adorably hung onto every word, even if Bryce edited the story somewhat, giving her at least an over-shirt in this tale. She sipped her cocoa and parsed his words. Maybe some unspoken rivalry between the two of them? Chuck seemed open and engaging despite his time underground, and very quick-witted. The type, Sarah realized, that wouldn’t quite get just how charming and intelligent he could be. His unassuming air next to Bryce’s calculated charisma had probably set up an ingrained competition during their time at college. Though, given the frequency and intensity of Chuck’s smiles, she had to wonder if he knew about it at all.

“They kicked you out of the country?” Chuck demanded, and Sarah hid a jolt as that brought her crashing back into the conversation. She didn’t normally let her thoughts wander this much, even when she was this logy. Maybe it was time to just let the two friends catch up without the awkward fifth wheel around. She was about to suggest that, but Chuck had turned that slightly awestruck gaze toward her. Just playing the good host and making sure all of his guests were having a good time.

“It was recommended that we leave,” she said, her voice a bit rusty from disuse. “Recommended strongly.”

Through a bullhorn, from the top of a tank. By a platoon of soldiers bearing M16 assault rifles.

“With guns,” Bryce said, stating the obvious.

Chuck’s awestruck look turned to sheer adoration. “You two live the coolest life. You really took out six guys by yourself, Sarah?”

She couldn’t recall the exact number. She’d been fighting off interrogation drugs and had been more concerned about her state of undress than anything. Praise the gods that two years of seduction missions had cleared up the potential for any future embarrassment right up. Even so, with Chuck staring at her like that, with something akin to hero worship, she felt a little…uncomfortable. So she crossed her arms. “It was more like eight,” came out of her mouth, though she had no idea why.

“Eight?” And there it was: puppy love.

Oh, great. She should probably nip that in the bud, no matter if it started a strange tingle at the back of her neck or not.

Definitely time to clear the room. Let Bryce work on his friend’s idolizing. “Just another day’s work,” she said, and stood up. Her knees popped, and her body protested, but she kept herself upright. “I’m kind of tired.” Understatement of the year. “Do you gentlemen mind if I take a nap?”

Apparently, that sent Chuck into babble mode. Somebody had drilled etiquette into him early on, she determined as he surged to his feet. Did he do that every time a woman came into and left a room? That was a rare bit of chivalry she never saw these days.

She didn’t look at Bryce as she left. She didn’t want to know what he thought of Chuck Bartowski’s chivalry. Probably something snarky, which would only ruin the moment. So she just thanked Chuck and ducked into the bunk room, shutting the door firmly behind her. The temptation to stay at the door and listen lingered only for a few seconds.

Out of sight of the boys, she let her shoulders sag. She gave in to the tiredness for a moment, leaning against the bunk before she hunkered down to drag out her pack. Digging out clothes seemed to take up most of her energy reserves, so she staggered to the showering tube in the corner—and blinked.

“Creative little soldier, aren’t you?” she said aloud, and nearly blushed. She wasn’t the type to talk to herself. Ever. Maybe Bryce and Chuck’s verbal back-and-forth was affecting her more strongly because of the exhaustion.

The setup that Chuck had rigged in the confined heat tube was just genius. He’d woven some kind of netting together, maybe out of old regulation uniforms, and had strung it up against one narrow wall of the heat tube, with pegs to make it easy to flip around so that only one half of the net was under the water spray. A pocket had been sewn into it to hold laundry soap, and there were clothespins to hang laundry from. An ingenious and efficient system.

She stripped down, hanging her clothes neatly on pegs that were protected from the water spray by a plastic curtain, and stepped under the spray.

The warm water made her go weak at the knees.

She didn’t bother with her own soap, choosing to use what was readily available. She’d lived with worse than government body wash and shampoo. And the shower felt glorious, the hard spray clearing away some of the fatigue, leaving her to puzzle at its source. She prided herself on knowing her body, her limits, hell, even her mind well. So why the blitz of feebleness?

Oh well, she’d give the boys some privacy and take a nap anyway. It couldn’t hurt to sleep while she could.

She spent an extra few minutes toweling her hair off. Thankfully, all the wispy blonde dried quickly. If she’d been born with thick hair, she’d probably have a miserable time in the bunker, as it would never dry and she hadn’t felt that a hairdryer was exactly a good addition to a pack during a jump. No wonder Chuck kept his hair in a buzz-cut.

Dressed, parka in hand, she practically sprinted across the bunk room and dove into the bunk. The sooner she got into the sleeping bag and tucked in, the sooner it would warm up. She huddled down into the bag so that only her forehead would be visible to anybody in the bunk room. It smelled…pleasant, she decided. Since the agent lifestyle included both five star hotels and dung-heap hovels, she could sleep through any sort of odor, reek, or stench. But Chuck hadn’t been lying when he’d claimed he showered daily.

Surrounded by warmth and the comforting scent, she was out in minutes.

 **17 NOVEMBER 2005  
BUNKER 77142135  
18:19 OMST**

She stirred when the bunk door opened, and shot to full wakefulness at the sound of footsteps, automatically reaching for the gun she’d stashed under the pillow.

“It’s just me.” She couldn’t see Bryce’s smile in the dimness, but she could hear it in his voice. “Relax, go back to sleep.”

She blinked away grogginess. Because her mind had engaged itself automatically, sleep wouldn’t come back quickly. She should’ve packed a sleep mask. Grumbling, she moved her watch into the narrow beam of light the door let in and read the time. “Where’s Chuck?”

“He noticed that I was trying to nose-dive into the table, and insisted I get some shut-eye. I’m gonna take a shower. Get some more sleep.”

It was a useless thing to say. While he was moving about the room, she’d just doze. They both knew it. She yawned and stretched, keeping her eyes closed while he rummaged around his pack and disappeared into the heat tube. The door muffled the sound of water somewhat, but not enough for her to get back to sleep, so she dug around in her pack one-handed until she found the small book she’d allowed herself to carry. Just four extra ounces, and somehow, extremely vital. She flipped to the dog-eared page and began to read, though she’d memorized all of the words years before, how they looked, how the ink had bled with age and the porosity of the pages.

Damn near photographic memory, indeed.

When Bryce came out, freshly shaved and showered, she had her fingers crossed behind her head and was studying the underside of the bunk above. The book lay facedown on her chest. “How does he do it, do you think?”

“Hmm?” Bryce, of course, neatly began to fold and stow all of his dirty laundry into his pack. He’d beaten her scores at Fort Benning and Brandon Lear had made more friends there than Sandra Williamson. It was one of their many competitions.

Right now, Sarah didn’t care. “How does he exist in such a cramped space? And still find ways to be cheerful?”

“That’s Chuck Bartowski for you.” Bryce’s hands slowed as he packed the clothing away. Sarah noticed. “He and his sister, they’re both that way. Damned affable, and can take anything life throws at them, which is a lot.”

So another CIA member with an actual family somewhere, just like Bryce. “Does he see his sister at all?”

“I’m sure he does.”

That was a lie, Sarah decided, but she’d let Bryce have it. For now.

“Is it bothering you?” Bryce asked as he zipped his pack up.

Sarah didn’t have to ask what he meant. They’d had to develop something scarily akin to telepathy to survive as much as they had together. She moved a shoulder. “I’m fine.”

“The lack of space isn’t—”

“Bryce, I’m fine.” She edged just enough annoyance into her words to remind him that he wasn’t quite off the hook about Cabo yet, charming college friend or not. When he shrugged back at her and started to climb into the top bunk, she levered herself up onto her elbows. “What are you doing?”

“Getting some sleep.”

“What? There’s only two bunks in here. Where’s Chuck going to sleep?”

Bryce, on the top bunk now, leaned over so that she could see his face, hanging upside down, over her bunk. “He said he’s going to sleep in his desk chair. He wanted to get some work in on a gadget.”

“He shouldn’t have to sleep in his desk chair.”

“That’s Chuck Bartowski for you. Besides,” and Bryce’s grin turned devilish, “if he can’t sleep, he can just crawl in with one of us. It’ll probably be you. Poor guy hasn’t _seen_ a woman in months. It’s really the least you could do.”

“Or you can get your ass down here and get in the damn sleeping bag with me, so that we’re not literally kicking the poor guy out of his bed.”

“Sarah, is now really the time? I mean, wouldn’t that just be rubbing it in the poor guy’s face?”

Sarah shut him down with one extremely icy look. “Oh, you think you’re actually going to get sex from me in the next six months? _Cabo_ , Bryce Christopher Larkin. I bought a new bikini and everything, which I honestly don’t think I’m going to get to use here.” She blew out a puff of air, her breath condensing briefly in the cold.

“Oh, I don’t know, I think the cold would make you look rather fetch—” Bryce, perhaps finally sensing the homicidal flavor to her icy stare, abruptly stopped. “Okay, never mind. I’m sorry about Cabo, Sarah.”

“Whatever.”

“But Chuck’ll be fine. The guy can sleep anywhere. You should’ve seen him back at Stanford. He’s like a chiropractor’s worst nightmare.” Bryce’s head vanished. She heard him yawn, and it seemed genuine. “Seriously, if it bugs him, tell him to crawl in with you. One of us guys should get lucky while we’re here, and why not Chuck Bartowski, right?”

Why not Chuck Bartowski? Sarah rolled her eyes, but kept her fingers away from her knives just in case temper overtook her. It wouldn’t do to put a hole in one of Chuck’s bunks—or her partner, either, though admittedly she’d feel a little less bad about that.

She carefully replaced her book in her pack and burrowed into the sleeping bag again.

She blamed both the scent and Bryce’s lewd comments for the dreams that followed.


	2. Earth and Sky

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,  
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;  
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,  
When two strong men stand face to face,  
tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!  
\- _Rudyard Kipling_ , **The Ballad of East and West**

 **17 NOVEMBER 2005  
WITH SARAH  
09:54 GMC/UMT**

Sarah felt the sand between her toes, the fine, soft grit of it, the way it gave slightly under the pads of her feet as she ran. The way the power in her calves increased to make up for the shifting surface, the way her thighs and center adjusted. God, she loved running on sand, more than any other surface on the planet. She had a trail she liked in Rock Creek Park near her unobtrusive little apartment in DC, and the Grand Canyon would always provide splendor for a good sunrise jog, but nothing in her mind would beat the beaches of San Diego. Even if she’d been Jenny Burton then—and what an awkward ugly duckling stage _that_ had been—she’d loved those beaches.

Cabo San Lucas came pretty damn close.

She could feel the sun on her bare shoulders, just beginning to hit full strength. It was already hot, and only just after dawn. By noon, it would probably be sweltering. Perfect. She’d find a beach chair by the pool and let the sun kiss her to a gentle shade of brown. And she’d let Bryce appreciate every inch of the bikini she’d packed—or rather, every inch of what said bikini didn’t cover.

That thought made her frown as she glanced toward the sand next to her. Bryce loved the beach almost as much as she did. He’d spent his summers growing up in the Vineyard, she knew, which meant he could appreciate a good beach. Even if it was a New England beach. The fact that he hadn’t joined her on her run was…unusual. Maybe he was taking the vacation seriously, even if it seemed out of character for him to miss a run. Oh well. Who was she to judge? She’d faced death, delirium, and boredom with Bryce, so she understood how his mind worked in all of those cases. But maybe she’d just have to learn about vacation Bryce, too.

It excited her that there was still so much to learn.

Proving that he did indeed have the ability to read her mind, she heard the muffled sound of running footsteps close behind her. The hair on the back of her neck rose—not her danger signal, or spider-sense or whatever the hell Bryce called it, but the cool tingle of anticipation she’d started feeling very early in their relationship whenever he approached. Today it was like a sizzling, almost welcoming punch low in her abdomen.

So she turned without slowing her pace, and jogged backward. Her greeting died on her lips.

It wasn’t Bryce’s perfectly coiffed mop that flopped in the breeze as he ran, but a military buzz-cut. And the eyes that smiled at her weren’t crystal blue, but rather, brown, and much, much warmer.

“Hey,” Chuck greeted her before she could say anything. “Need a partner?”

Sarah felt her heart rate trip, and knew it had nothing to do with the run. Unbidden, her face smiled right back. It was a variation of the smile she used to stun hapless men into doing her bidding. Only this time it came automatically and without the intent to manipulate. “Finally,” she heard herself say. “What took you so long?”

Chuck shrugged. “Had other things to do. Not as important as this, though.” He matched his pace to hers, and Sarah turned so that she was jogging forward with him. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“I’m glad you could make it. I was worried.” Had she been? What on earth had she been thinking at all? She couldn’t remember. All she knew was that she _was_ glad, infinitely so, that he was there at all, that he was smiling like that, and all for her.

God, Samantha, you utter sap.

Instead of calling her out on her extreme cheesiness, Chuck just smiled down at her. “You worry too much.”

“I know, it’s a bad habit.”

Chuck nodded sagely. “Of which you have many.”

Sarah pushed him. He stumbled sideways, laughing. “Speaking of bad habits…” He trailed off, his grin lighting the whole beach once more. “I thought we were working on your violent ways, Sarah.”

She loved the way he said her cover name, the way his voice dipped on the first syllable. “Dunno. Guess you just bring out the worst in me.”

“Do I?”

“You’re being very enigmatic.”

“Really? I thought I was an open book.” Chuck’s eyes sparkled.

“Oh, sure, an open book written in Sanskrit, maybe.” Sarah rolled her own eyes. “What’s your secret, Chuck?”

He wasn’t even puffing and out of breath. And he filled out a T-shirt far better than he did a parka and snow pants. Even if it was the faded old Harvard T-shirt that she was positive was sitting back in her closet in DC. She used it as a sleep shirt. Chuck used it to look pretty damn good. He shrugged; the T-shirt flapped in the breeze. “Who says I’ve got a secret?”

“There’s something about you…”

“I’m just so damn adorable. Even Bryce Larkin thinks so.”

Sarah rolled her eyes. Mentions of Bryce, who had filled her with such anticipation earlier, now soured in her stomach. She felt the prickle of storm clouds beginning to form in the sky behind them, but ignored it. She was in Cabo, she was running on the beach, and she had a cute if mysterious man keeping her company. Don’t spoil it, she told herself.

“You just have an answer for everything, don’t you?” she asked Chuck as they continued to run. The terrain of the beach had changed. Rock began to poke through the sand, and the waves crashed against dark boulders sticking out from the water with the noise of thunderclaps.

Chuck regarded her seriously for the first time since he’d joined her on her run. “I’m not sure.” His voice was quiet, with a hint of vulnerability that hadn’t been there before.

“What? Why not?” She didn’t like vague answers. They led to far too many possibilities, and even the best agent couldn’t cover every possibility.

Now, Chuck smiled. “It’s not my head, Sarah. It’s yours.”

“What?”

“I live in a bunker in the middle of nowhere.” Chuck spread his arms wide to include the entire beach as they continued jogging, ever onward, ever toward some goal Sarah couldn’t see. “It takes three planes, jumping out of one of those planes, and snow shoes before you’re even considered to be in the neighborhood. But that’s okay, I don’t seem to mind the lack of space, though it drives _you_ insane. Which one of us came up with this beach? Which one of us is from San Diego?”

“I’m not from…” Sarah flushed a dark shade of red. When had she begun blurting out details about herself to the lowest bidder? She covered by scowling. “It’s not in my head, it’s too real.”

“Maybe your head is a scary place.”

“You can’t be from my head. You’re too real,” Sarah said. She slowed her pace, which was unusual. Being deep in thought usually meant she just ran harder. Now she changed her path, moving right next to the water’s edge. “Look, even the ocean, it’s real. This isn’t a dream. I’m in Cabo, you’re running on the beach with me, and look!” She kicked up a spray of water.

Chuck laughed, recoiling backward as the arc of water hit him. “Wow, you’re bossy.”

“You keep pointing out my faults,” Sarah said. “That’s hardly fair.”

“Well, it’s your head. Maybe you should have it examined—hey!” Chuck laughed again as she kicked more water at him. “Oh, come on, talk about not being fair!”

But Sarah felt something slick and dangerous, something exciting, begin to spread from her middle. Giddiness sped through her, making her oddly light-headed. The anticipation from earlier paled completely in the face of this tug behind her belly button, this insurmountable yearning that seemed to sing out from everywhere inside her.

She gave Chuck a sultry smile and slowly began to back up, enjoying the way eddies of sand and water swirled between her toes. Water lapped against her ankles, and her calves and knees, and finally the tops of her thighs.

Chuck watched, his face absolutely inscrutable.

Sarah shrugged to herself, just a little bounce up and down of her shoulders. He’d get the message eventually. She spun on the spot and walked forward until the water hit just above her midriff, soaking her running pants and lapping against the bottom of her sports bra. Then, and only then, did she turn and give Chuck her best come-hither look. “So? Are you coming or not, hmm?”

The wolfish grin should have looked out of place. The swagger shouldn’t have worked for such an open, honest character, but her pulse skipped a few beats. Especially since he didn’t race across the water like some demented cartoon, as she knew many men would when she used _that_ particular expression. No, he kept his eyes on her the whole way, so that she could feel shivers of electricity race up and down her arms and shimmer down her back. He seemed to know his affect on her, for he smirked.

Okay. She’d let him have his fun. For now.

When he was about a foot away, he stopped. The downward slope of the sand made him that much taller, so that her nose rose up to his sternum rather than his chin. The sunlight surrounded him like an aura, making his skin glow. From this distance, she was practically wrapped in his scent over the salty tang in the air: government soap, light sweat, and the exhilarating undercurrents of something essentially male.

Sarah’s mouth went dry.

If they were in her head, like he claimed, he wouldn’t have a single problem reading her thoughts. He proved it by smirking.

It was the smirk that did her in. Probably. She was already insane for being here at all, wherever here was: her head, Cabo, San Diego, Siberia. She’d stopped knowing the instant Chuck had shown up and smiled at her. It didn’t matter one damn bit where they were. She dug her foot into the sand just as a wave crashed over her shoulders and launched herself at him.

They went down in a rumble of seawater and entangled bodies. The current dragged them up toward the shore. If it hurt Chuck at all, he certainly didn’t complain. He kissed her back with the same intensity, one hand tangling in her hair (why she’d worn it down for her run, she had no idea, but she could be grateful now), the other hand at the small of her back to pull her closer. She wrapped herself around him as if he could vanish at any second. This need wasn’t fueled by adrenaline, there wasn’t somebody showing up to kill them at any second. She just wanted, oh, God, she didn’t think she’d ever wanted this much.

She felt Chuck’s laugh rumble up his chest. He dragged his head back and laughed louder. “You’re trying to drown us.”

“Not really.” They’d somehow ended up mostly on the shore, with Chuck on his back looking up at her, her body splayed over his and the waves swirling around them both. She didn’t know how they’d gotten there. She didn’t care. “If I wanted to drown us, we’d be dead.”

Assassin.

It was an ugly word. The ugliest word in any language on the planet. She should know: she knew quite a few damned languages.

The storm clouds from the west drew nearer.

But Chuck didn’t seem to notice the clouds or the rocks. He just gave her that smile, the one that had made her heart stutter into her ribcage the day before. “Who says I can’t save us both if you try to drown us?” he asked. “I already did, after all.” He untangled his fingers from her hair to hit the side of his fist against the wet sand as an example.

“Why is it your job to save us?” She wanted to purr when that hand moved to her shoulder and began to caress, even covered in gritty sand.

“I don’t know, Sarah.” Chuck smiled and began to kiss her, his lips trailing down her neck to her shoulder. “It’s your head, not mine.”

“You’ve really…got to stop saying that,” Sarah said, her concentration broken. “I think you’re single-handedly trying to drive me to go see a shrink—”

“Hey, crazy lady, shut up and pay attention, will you?” Chuck smiled against her skin as his mouth moved lower. “I’m trying to work here.”

“Oh…right. Carry on.” The man had a great point. Why on earth was she _talking_ when there was the definite offer of sex, no danger necessary, just a couple of consenting adults on the sand? She dove into the prospect with a fervor that matched Chuck’s, her hands roaming freely.

Goosebumps rose over every blessed inch of her body, warmed only by his hands. She’d never felt wanton enough to be so…indecorous when people might happen on them at any second. Right now, she didn’t care. She just wanted more. It became some kind of a frantic, laughing battle as she tried to pull his shirt over his head without breaking the kiss; he pounced and rolled, taking her with him and pinning her. She didn’t care if the sand was everywhere, or that the water on his skin was salty, making her thirsty.

She’d probably never get tired of this. Ever.

When she wormed out of her sports bra, flinging it to the side, he groaned happily.

Neither of them noticed the sun vanish almost completely, plunging the day into gloom. They paid no attention whatsoever to the first hesitant raindrops falling from the sky. The winds picking up absolutely did no register.

It wasn’t until lightning slashed across the sky, and a few drops turned to a sheet of angry, stinging rain, that they realized that there might be something else going on. Chuck unfortunately lifted his head, his hands stilling. “Uh-oh,” he said, blinking as rainwater ran down his face in rivulets and dripped onto her chest. “Guess that’s my cue.”

“For what?” She didn’t care about rain or storms. Not when she was so close to…well, so close.

But Chuck, much to her everlasting disappointment, rolled off of her and climbed to his feet, leaving her wet, and cold, and practically naked in the middle of the sand. She gaped as he simply picked up his sopping shirt and pulled it on. “Gotta go,” he said.

“Go? Go _where_?” What the hell?

Chuck shook his head. Even with his hair so short it was practically invisible, he sent rainwater slinging this way and that. He gave her a disbelieving look, as if she were the idiot for not getting it, rather than him. “Do you not see the storm, Sarah?”

“It’s kind of hard to miss.”

“And it doesn’t mean anything to you?”

“It’s a storm. Storms happen.” Dammit, she really was going to explode. She could feel the pressure building with nowhere to go, leaving her absolutely frustrated and alone. “C’mon, Chuck, we can—”

“Nope, we can’t. No time.”

“Why not? It’s just a little rain.”

“Because the storm means, Sarah Walker,” and Chuck gave her one last bone-melting smile, “it’s time for you to wake up.”

In a frozen bunker thousands of miles from Cabo San Lucas, surrounded by the scent of Charles Bartowski, Sarah woke with a gasp.

 **18 NOVEMBER 2005  
BUNKER 77142135  
01:12 OMST**

She bolted upright in the bunk, ignoring the cold air that rushed in over her arms. It was dark enough so that she couldn’t even see three fingers in front of her face, but she still peered into the darkness like it might have some answers for her. “What…the…hell?”

Sarah Walker did not have sex dreams about a guy she’d only just met. Hell, Sarah Walker didn’t have sex dreams, period. Sarah Walker barely had _sex._

So what on earth was all of that about? Had her dream-self really been this close to doing the nasty with her partner’s best friend? Sarah pushed both hands through her hair and took a deep breath, trying to calm her racing heart (and other parts of her anatomy, really. Dream Chuck was an excellent kisser). Maybe she should take her dream self’s advice and go spend a few hours talking to a shrink. Surely the kind of thing she’d just experienced wasn’t normal.

Bryce, always a light sleeper, stirred in the bunk above hers. “Sarah?” he murmured, sounding half-asleep. “Something the matter?”

“N-no.” She couldn’t quite hide the stammer in her voice, and wanted to curse.

Bryce of course picked up on it. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“Bad dream? It wasn’t the—”

“No,” Sarah cut in, knowing exactly what he was about to ask. If he mentioned the words “Red Test,” she’d suffer flashbacks of jewelry hitting the pavement, the greasy feel of her finger on the trigger, the damning boom and recoil of the gun in her hand.

Some nameless woman, dead because of an order.

It had been that moment when Sarah Walker had started hating guns.

She squeezed that old pain back into its corner. Her eyes had adjusted to the almost total lack of light in the room, enough for her to make out details. Had the bunker grown smaller while she slept? It certainly felt like it.

“No, nothing like that,” she said, keeping her voice even. “Just had a weird dream. You should just go back to sleep. I’m going to go raid the kitchen. I’m a little wired.”

“Okay.” And just like that, Bryce dropped back into sleep.

She wasn’t envious of the ability, as it was something that she shared. Field agents never knew when the next opportunity to rest would come. They could drop off to sleep in the middle of a war zone if the need arose.

Of course, they could also wake up and be ready to stab you in the ear at the same instant. The ability to sleep at will didn’t automatically make one a morning person.

She took a deep breath to calm her fluttering stomach. Bad idea. She was still buried in the sleeping bag from the waist down, which meant that she could smell Chuck everywhere. That had been the reason for the odd and erotic dream, nothing else. Well, maybe that and exhaustion. Of course, it could also be the job. Their last mission had almost gone horribly wrong, and she hadn’t still adjusted her headspace around what might have been. Yes, her job, and the stress. Clearly, that was it.

Belatedly realizing that she was shivering with just her long-johns exposed to the bunker air, she shoved her arms into the sleeve of her parka. It took a minute of a pep talk—she _hated_ the cold—to convince her to swing her legs out of the sleeping bag so that she could pull her ski pants on over her thermal legwarmers. She shoved her toes into her boots.

After a dream like that, she needed a drink. She always carried something, even if it was usually only used when one of them had been shot. No gunshot wounds today, thankfully, but after the one-two punch her mind had delivered, imbibing was a necessity. She’d just go out to the kitchen and drink there where Bryce wouldn’t wake up and wonder. She’d likely have the room to herself, as Chuck probably kept to a rigid schedule and would be trying to sleep—poor guy—in his desk chair.

She spotted the worn box of cards sitting on one of the room’s tiny shelves, and pocketed it. A few hours with whiskey and solitaire sounded like a good idea. Hoping not to wake Bryce again, she eased open the bunk room door—

“Oh, you’re awake.”

Sarah’s mind flittered through fourteen different curses she’d learned over the years, each growing more vicious. Her head shot up from where she’d been watching her step in the darkness.

And there he was, the current star of her very bizarre dreams, huddled into that gray army parka and sitting not five feet away at the tiny kitchen table. He was working on something clamped in a vise, a soldering gun perfectly at home in his hand. And he was smiling at her, somewhat nervously.

Her pulse skidded. She cursed again and bought time by closing the bunk room door. “I thought you were asleep,” came rather stupidly out of her mouth. Why the hell aren’t you? She wanted to ask. You should be sleeping, and I should be drinking and not thinking about you and how good you smell, damn it.

Another smile, slightly self-deprecating, as he holstered the soldering iron. “I can’t seem to sleep.”

Probably, Sarah thought, because Bryce had kicked him out of his bed.

“Figured I’d use up the extra energy.” Belatedly, Chuck seemed to remember himself. That odd chivalry kicked in again; he rose to his feet, stooped forward slightly because the ceiling was so low. Sarah wished he wouldn’t do that. She didn’t really need to be reminded at just how much space there wasn’t. She took a deep, silent breath.

“Can I, um, get you anything? I can heat you up some Spaghetti-Os.” He gestured at a small range built into the wall by the room’s tiny sink. “I don’t recommend the MREs I usually eat, though come to think of it, you might not mind them so much. They’re actually pretty tasty.” He looked sheepish, and wasn’t that just adorable? Stop it, Walker. “They’re just, you know, the only thing I have to eat, so I’m kind of tired of them—”

If she didn’t stop him, he’d probably just keep going until he talked himself into going out into the cold and killing her a bear to eat. Did they have bears in Siberia? The way the geek across from her babbled on, he’d probably find out soon. “It’s okay,” she said, her smile coming unbidden despite the lack of space and the strangeness still making her head spin. “I’ll just have an MRE.”

“All right. Pick your poison. We’ve got—oh.”

Hoping that if she sat down, Chuck might do the same, Sarah snatched an MRE and plopped down at the table. They’d never be anybody’s first choice of meal—anybody sane, that is—but she’d been stuck with nothing but MREs for days before. She had no idea how Chuck survived. Didn’t he miss real food? Space? Other humans? Any of that? Why was he so damn cheerful when she’d very well start screaming, silently, and never stop?

She kept that to herself as she assured Chuck she was fine, and that she’d been through the drill before, so he asked about her nap instead.

It took every ounce of self-control she possessed not to flush the color of a police siren. “Actually,” and her voice probably only sounded nervous to her, which made her grateful that Bryce wasn’t around to call her on it, “yes. The cot’s actually pretty comfortable.” Damn it, she’d used “actually” twice. Always a tell. So she covered as she messed with her drink packet: “Bryce is out for the count.”

“I wouldn’t trust that if I were you.”

What? Had Chuck formed suspicions of Bryce in the past ten hours? He’d seemed to adore the ground his friend walked on. Sarah stilled. “Why not?”

“It’s by far the dodgiest of the entire variety. Here, I’ll mix up my specialty.”

Oh. He was talking about the drink, not Bryce. This was bad—she really needed to clear her head. Maybe she should get out of here, grab her snowshoes and maybe go for a run.

In the middle of the night. In the woods. In Siberia. In November.

Okay, she’d had better ideas.

She worked through the MRE quickly. Though she’d had a couple of high calorie chews during their trek, even the memory of food was distant. Eating gave her something to do, an objective where she wouldn’t likely embarrass herself or let the man currently puttering around his tiny kitchen know that she’d been envisioning him mostly naked on a beach thousands of miles away. She flicked glances at him as she ate. Her dream self had picked up quite a bit of detail in his face—unsurprising, since the inability to not place a face right away could mean death for an operative—but she hadn’t caught just the trace of mawkishness in his movements, or the way that he tilted his head slightly to the left. The first likely from an unexpected growth spurt and clumsy adolescent years. The second, if she had to guess, she’d blame on years of computer usage.

He dug out an empty gallon container of some type and filled it at the sink.

“So what is it you do, Chuck?” she asked once most of the MRE had been demolished.

He seemed to be concentrating pretty deeply for somebody whose only task was filling a water jug. “I’m an analyst. I analyze various data sources to make sure they’re not being used by terrorist groups to pass encrypted messages.”

In Russian? Wow, Bryce’s friend must be even more brilliant than she’d thought.

“Sounds important,” she prodded.

“I guess.”

Since she had a basic grasp of Russian thanks to a few weeks in Monterey—Airman Stephanie Wilkins this time—she asked about his hobbies. If he was anything like Bryce, he had a few of them. And hey, it couldn’t hurt to work on her Russian with a master.

Except Chuck’s hands never slowed as he continued making his specialty, whatever that was. “Say what now?”

What the hell? It hadn’t been that difficult of a question unless…he didn’t speak Russian. That meant that they’d stuck some guy who didn’t speak Russian out in the middle of a bunker in Siberia to analyze data. Something he could have done from any computer in the world.

“You don’t speak Russian?” she asked, just to make sure he just hadn’t heard her right.

“ _Nyet_.”

Cute. But puzzling. “So why do they have you stashed in the middle of Siberia?”

Here’s the confession, Sarah thought. Chuck really was a mass murderer, but too brilliant of an analyst to let go, so they’d stashed him where he couldn’t do any damage.

He turned slowly, shaking the gallon container almost absently. “One of life’s greatest mysteries.” His smile seemed resigned. “There were two guys here before me, and two with me at separate points. They all listened to Russian chatter and the like, but me, I’m an English-only kind of guy with the occasional foray into bad Spanish.” Again, cute. “I’ve no idea why they ‘stashed’ me here.” He raised his free hand to make air-quotes.

She ignored the gesture. Bryce made fun of her word choices all the time; it was just part of her life. “Aren’t you at least a little bit curious?”

“Not really. My theory is that they spent too much money on me to just let me go when I apparently failed spy school, so…to the wilds of Siberia it is.”

If Chuck and Bryce had graduated together, Chuck would have been at the Farm at the same time as her, since the Farm had been her home, on and off, for a good five years when she wasn’t away at school. More off than on, admittedly, as the government had delighted on sending her to every training imaginable. Beautiful blonde assassins don’t come a dime a dozen, one of her instructors had pointed out once. Sarah had almost used her bare hands to show him why.

But she would have at least seen Chuck sometime. Unless they’d had him in a specialized program—maybe for his data analysis? She ran through the options even as Chuck made a show of pulling out juice tumblers and pouring. He offered her the glass first, of course. Chivalrous to the bone. She wondered if he’d left some sort of girlfriend behind.

It took her a moment to recognize the taste of the orange drink since she had to go all the way back to childhood to do it. “Tang? Really?”

“Really. I live off of this stuff. It’s what they give astronauts, you know.” He probably didn’t even realize he was doing it, but as Chuck screwed the lid back on the gallon, he laughed. Just a little, self-deprecatingly and proudly at the same time. He was a guy tucked away where nobody would find him, days from civilization, and he was still just geeky enough to be happy to drink what the astronauts did.

Sarah’s heart swelled even as her mind asked, “What the hell?”

She almost didn’t hear Chuck’s next statement. “It’s the only thing they never forget to send, which is good because the water tastes like crap.”

Ah, there was the bitterness. She was both relieved and sad to hear it.

“Do you actually like Tang?” She wasn’t sure she did. It was far too sugary. Next time, she’d take her chances with the water.

“Brent used to add vodka to make it better, but me, I’m a whiskey man, myself.”

“Oh, are you now?” Suddenly remembering her original purpose for coming into the kitchen, Sarah unveiled the flask. She poured more than a prudent amount into her cup—the Tang really was disgusting, and she _was_ still getting occasional flashes of dream Chuck. At least it was keeping the kitchen somewhat warm.

Their fingers brushed as Chuck took the flask.

“You’re my hero.”

She had to smile at that. She was hardly anybody’s hero. “I aim to please.”

“To spies?” Chuck raised his glass.

She clinked her own against it. “To spies.”

“It’s been years since I had real whiskey,” Chuck said after they’d taken a drink. Well, Sarah had downed half of her cup in one swallow, but she wasn’t going to confess that. “Real whiskey,” Chuck clarified, “not the crap Paul used to drink. I miss it.”

She couldn’t imagine a life like that, spent so far away from everything. If she wanted to get rip-roaring drunk off of any alcohol of her choice, there was a liquor store right down the street from her house. And if she was on a job…well, what she wanted on a job didn’t matter.

“So what do you drink if not water or whiskey?”

“Tang. Lots and lots of Tang.”

Sarah wrinkled her nose at the orange concoction in her glass. The whiskey made it tolerable, but only just. “You’re a stronger person than me, then,” she said, meaning it.

She wasn’t expecting a bitter laugh. It made her tense. “Am I? You’re out in the line of fire, kicking butt and taking names.”

Hardly, Sarah thought. If she was out in the line of fire, people were just dying. A bullet could end your existence just like that, and it didn’t even have to be aimed properly.

“Doing something active,” Chuck went on, “while I just sit here on my butt and drink Tang.”

The man lived a solitary existence in the middle of nowhere, cut off from everything he knew. Bryce had mentioned a sister, and Sarah didn’t figure Chuck got more than a few words with her every week, if even that. They hadn’t even had the decency to get him a properly sized bunker where he could walk around without needing to hunch all of the time. To be fair, Chuck was almost freakishly tall, but it rankled. She made sure to meet his eyes. “Sit here apart from all of your friends and family and life, and continue to work for the people who put you here because you believe in justice enough to keep going,” she said. “Don’t put yourself down.”

That startled him. He sat silently for a minute, his mouth working but no words coming out. She waited him out because it was easier to let him lead the conversation. Meanwhile, where the hell had that come from? And what had happened to Sarah Walker, she of the few words? Her old instructor had once claimed that she could make a mime look like a chatterbox.

“I notice you didn’t mention the Tang,” Chuck said.

She shrugged to cover her nerves. “Like I said, you’re a stronger person than me. And my life is not like…” She had to search her memory for a proper reference, as that was Bryce’s forte, not hers. “The Bond movie you make it sound like.”

It was Bond, right? Her damn near photographic memory had better not make her look like an idiot.

“Probably for the best,” Chuck said.

“Why’s that?” If she didn’t do something with her hands soon, she’d start babbling. So Sarah pulled out the deck she’d pocketed earlier, and waved it at Chuck. “Cards?”

“Sure. And I’m just saying, a woman who, um, well…” Chuck paused and took a deep breath. The next bit came out in a rush. “A woman who looks like you has a very low life expectancy in a Bond film. Especially if she’s so obviously on the side of good. It’s like an unwritten law. Bond’s good colleagues tend to die. Unless you’re Miss Moneypenny. Or M.”

A woman who looked like her? Though she was under absolutely no illusions about the effect she had on the average male, Sarah’s hands stilled in her shuffling. She quickly covered with a laugh and began to deal before Chuck could take notice. At least the warmth suffusing her kept the bunker’s everlasting cold out. “Why can’t I be Bond? I mean, we’ve progressed in gender equality, haven’t we? Bond could be a woman.”

A snort. “Hello, Bond would clearly have to be Bryce, duh. Those chiseled looks, the blue eyes. Total Bond.”

It was said so matter-of-factly that she glanced over. She was ninety percent sure that Chuck was heterosexual, judging by his physical reactions to her, but…well, that ten percent nagged at her.

“Something you want to tell me, Chuck?”

“What?”

“Is there something you want to tell me about you and Bryce?”

Chuck froze. Everything about him just stopped. His Tang glass halfway to his lips, he stayed absolutely still and stared at her. Ten seconds passed. Twenty.

Oh, my God, Sarah thought before the sane part of her could chime in, I broke Chuck Bartowski.

Wait a second. What?

“Chuck?” she asked, hoping that he hadn’t just fallen asleep with his eyes open somehow. She was a pretty boring person, she knew, but he’d seemed interested up until a moment before.

Before she could snap her fingers in his face, Chuck jerked back to motion, quickly shaking his head and looking at her as though in a fog. “What? What? About me—and—and Bryce? _Oh_.” Realization dawned; instead of being offended, he actually laughed. “No, nothing like that. We’ve been friends for years, and I know what a great guy he is. Very James Bond like.”

Sarah didn’t know enough about James Bond to confirm or deny that. Bryce Larkin had his fair share of problems. He didn’t like the world to know about them, but they existed.

“And you have to admit,” Chuck went on, “the guy does have a pretty face.”

And killer eyes, and Bryce Larkin was obviously interested in her. So why had she been frolicking on the sand with Chuck, who, though attractive in a geeky, “aw shucks” sort of way, was supposed to be less conventionally handsome than his blue-eyed friend?

Why can’t you ever just make things easy? Her brain asked her.

Because that would just make too much damn sense.

 **18 NOVEMBER 2005  
BUNKER 77142135  
03:14 OMST**

“And my queen of hearts beats your jack of spades, which means…” Sarah raked the “pot,” which was in reality just a mixture of bolts and small parts that Chuck had scrounged up from around the bunker, closer to her.

“How do you _do_ that?” Chuck stared at the card in his hand, absolutely puzzled, and then back at her. “I mean, they don’t teach mind-reading at Quantico these days, do they?”

If they could, Sarah thought, they would. Anything to give their little duckling agents an edge. But she just shrugged and smirked as she took the card from him. “Not telling.”

“Oh, come on, that’s not fair. You’ve out-bluffed me seven times in a row. I know. I counted.” Chuck crossed his arms over his parka and did his best impression of a kid in a full-out sulk. “You have ESP, don’t you? You should just tell me and put me out of my misery.”

“If I _do_ have ESP, telling people about it would just be stupid.”

“Oh, sure, they’d try to lock you up,” Chuck said agreeably, the sulk disappearing. “But you’re forgetting two things.”

She doubted that. She could recite all of her locker combinations going back to the seventh grade. Sarah Walker simply didn’t forget things.

Still, she gestured at him to continue.

Chuck leaned forward. Maybe the whiskey was getting to him—they were each on the third glass of Whiskey-Tang, as Chuck had started to call it. His movements were getting just a little bit erratic, a hair slower. She could feel her own thoughts loosening, though she’d cut back on the amount of whiskey after the first drink.

“Thing one,” he said, poking a finger up. “You’re Sarah freaking Walker, a.k.a. Bristow of the CIA. They put you in a cage, you’ll not only be out in less than a minute, but every guard in the compound would be flat on his face, unconscious or dead. But man, what a way to go.”

She laughed, more at the flood of warmth that flushed through her rather than the apparent idolatry on his face.

“And thing two,” Chuck said, a second finger joining the first. He stared at both fingers for a second, seemingly baffled as to why he’d be holding them up, before he apparently remembered his own train of thought. “Even if you do have ESP, you can tell me. You know why? I live in a bunker. Who’m I going to tell?”

He spread his hands wide exactly as he’d done on the beach. She felt another flash of heat, this time completely different, and in a completely different region of her body.

“You have an excellent point. Chuck?” Sarah deliberately leaned forward, some evil part of her enjoying the way Chuck’s eyes followed hers. He mirrored her action, a smile prickling at the corners of his lips. “I don’t have ESP.”

“Aw.” He stuck his lip out, pouting. “I was kind of hoping you did.”

“So I can read your mind?”

Interestingly, that started a blush around Chuck’s neck. Maybe she should dial it down. The poor guy hadn’t seen a woman in a year, after all. As much as these little tells of his thrilled her on an elemental level, it wasn’t personal. He was bound to react this way to any female that walked through the door because biological imperative demanded it.

“Well, that’s a little off-putting,” Chuck said, and she barely suppressed her frown. “But no, I meant, if you had ESP, you could have something cool like telekinesis or pyrokinesis in addition to your telepathy.”

“Pyro-what?”

“The ability to control fire with your mind. Though you’d probably want the ability to create fire, too, or you’d just be a god among insects. Or rather, goddess.” Another flush, this time faint.

“Um, okay,” Sarah said, since she didn’t understand any of that. Except about the ability to control fire with her mind. What it had to do with insects, she couldn’t possibly fathom.

Less than twenty-four hours in Chuck Bartowski’s company, and she was already getting used to the fact that there were a lot of things about him she couldn’t fathom. He’d be happy to explain, she knew, and had several times. But it made her feel a little…dumb, and disconnected, to have to ask all of the time. So she nudged the cards at him. “You going to deal or not?”

“Fine, fine.” He picked up the deck and shuffled easily, his fingers far less incapacitated by the cold than hers. As always, he offered the deck to her to cut, which she did with a smile, and dealt out two cards, one for each of them. “Your bet, Miss Walker.”

Sarah pretended to squint at the card Chuck held up in front of his forehead, facing her. He squinted back. “Two bolts,” she said, tossing them in.

Amusingly, Chuck immediately reached out to straighten the bolts on the able, lining them up as he did every time. For that reason alone, she always made sure to splash the pot. He squinted at her again, his frown deepening. “Two bolts?” he asked. “That’s it?”

Sarah shrugged and made an “eh” noise, laughing when Chuck mimicked both the motion and the sound. “I believe it’s your bet, Mr. Bartowski.”

“So it is.” He carefully set two bolts next to the ones she’d tossed in, and added three more.

“Sure you want to do that?”

“Oh yeah.” The grin he shot across the table was surprisingly cocky. It made her remember the beach all over again. She covered a shiver by taking a drink. “Gonna see my bet, Walker?”

Sarah just made a point of sighing aloud as she parted with three more bolts. She let Chuck think that the three of clubs in his hand was hot stuff—until they both lowered their cards to the table.

“Oh, come on!” Chuck crossed his arms and pouted again. “A _four_. You beat me with a _four_. How is that possible?”

“Well, in this game, just like life, a four is higher than a three and—”

Chuck grinned. “Smartass.”

From anybody else, the name would have brought on hurt or aggravation. With Chuck, it was like a compliment, a mark of an equal or a peer. She smiled. “Thank you. My deal?”

“Sure, though I don’t know why I bother.” Chuck stuck his lower lip out and sighed dramatically. Before she could even finish shuffling the cards, he set his remaining five bolts into the pot.

“I didn’t even give you your card yet,” Sarah said, frowning.

“Let’s just say, I’m testing a theory. What’s the matter? Afraid to meet my bet? Gonna fold?” He made clucking noises, even going so far to flap his arms like a chicken.

Sarah deliberately splashed the pot with her ante and hid her smile when Chuck scrambled to line all of the bolts up. She shuffled, let him cut the deck, and tossed their cards onto the table, face-up. Chuck’s card was a ten of diamonds. Sarah pulled the ace of hearts.

“Ha!” Chuck stabbed a finger at her.

“Why are you acting all triumphant? I won.”

“Yeah, but that just proves my theory that you have x-ray vision.” Chuck pushed away from the table, wiping his hands on his pants as he rose.

“Where are you going?”

“To get more bolts from the office.”

Sarah frowned. “That’s cheating!”

“My bunker, my rules.” Chuck flashed her a quicksilver grin as he turned to go. As he did so, he happened to glance at the mirror over the stove. His eyes met hers, and he gave her what she was beginning to suspect was his patented goofy grin—before he realized exactly what the mirror meant. He whirled. “Speaking of cheating!”

“What?” Sarah asked, giving him an innocent look. She fought the desire to laugh, shoving it all behind a poker face.

“Nice,” Chuck said sarcastically. “You were able to see every single one of your cards, weren’t you?”

“More or less,” Sarah managed to say before she did something that she hadn’t done since college: she giggled. She slapped both hands over her mouth, but it was too late. The first damning giggle escaped. The rest of the flood was muffled by her hands, but the damage had been done.

Chuck rolled his eyes, but she could see the smile folding up at the corners of his mouth. He plopped right back into his desk chair and mock-glared at her, which only made her giggle harder. When he lunged across the table, she froze, but he only scooped up half of her winnings. “Hey!”

“You won these by cheating, which means they’re not yours.” Chuck stuck his tongue out at her.

She stuck hers out right back. “Don’t do that again. I’ve shot people for less.”

“I’m sure you have. Now, we’re playing real Texas Hold ‘Em, and I’m going to keep my cards under the table where you can’t read them.”

“Unless I’ve got a mirror on top of my shoe,” Sarah said innocently.

Chuck narrowed his eyes at her again. She saw his eyes dart down once, as if he was tempted to check, but he held her gaze. “I’m going to have to watch you like a hawk all the time, aren’t I?”

“Probably,” Sarah said, though she had no idea how he could possibly hope to do that from inside a bunker. Or why he would want to at all, stuck inside a bunker or no. Once he escaped this tiny Siberian prison, Chuck Bartowski was meant for great things, and Sarah was meant for whatever the government wanted next. And never, she thought a bit sadly as she watched him shuffle the deck to deal out Hold ‘Em, the twain shall meet.

“What’s the matter?” Chuck looked up from the cards. “You just got really morose all of a sudden.”

Had she? Sarah straightened and hastily schooled her expression closer to neutral. The alcohol must be affecting her more than she had thought. “It’s nothing,” she lied, and mentally scolded herself for slipping so much. “Deal the cards, Mr. Bartowski.”

He looked at her from under his eyelashes and flashed her a smile that made her traitorous heart do a slow roll in her chest. “Yes’m.”


	3. Only a Lilting Song

He’d have given me rolling lands,  
Houses of marble, and billowing farms,  
Pearls, to trickle between my hands,  
Smoldering rubies, to circle my arms.  
You— you’d only a lilting song,  
Only a melody, happy and high,  
You were sudden and swift and strong—  
Never a thought for another had I.

He’d have given me laces rare,  
Dresses that glimmered with frosty sheen,  
Shining ribbons to wrap my hair,  
Horses to draw me, as fine as a queen.  
You— you’d only to whistle low,  
Gayly I followed wherever you led.  
I took you, and I let him go—  
Somebody ought to examine my head!  
\- _Dorothy Parker_ , **The Choice**

 **19 NOVEMBER 2005  
BUNKER 77142135  
02:17 OMST**

Sarah glanced over when the bunk room door opened, though Bryce, next to her, kept his eyes closed and his attention on the routine. He’d nag later, but she wasn’t going to be rude. So she smiled at Chuck, craning her neck so that she could see him. She’d take her unbalanced chi and like it. “Get enough sleep?”

He rubbed at his eyes, somewhat adorably, and yawned. She could smell the shower on his skin and see a patch of fuzz on the side of his chin he’d missed while shaving. “I’m good. What are you two doing?”

“Tai Chi. Want in?”

Chuck eyed the remaining kitchen space. They’d wedged his table into the office to make space, and Sarah saw his eyes pause on the spot. A small frown worked its way through before he turned his attention back to her and smiled. “Um, one more person in there might just make that an orgy, thanks.”

Sarah laughed. Something rang inside the bunk room. With a sigh, Bryce opened his eyes and went from the crane position to standing. “That’ll be for me.”

“Right,” Chuck said as he moved out of the way to let Bryce by, “that makes sense because I left my satellite phone in my other bunker, you know. Drat.” He snapped his fingers and made Sarah giggle with his sardonic look, something that had become distressingly common during her time in Bunker 77142135.

“You’re sure you got enough sleep?” she asked. They’d kept Chuck up for more than thirty hours by her estimation. Though he had insisted that he would sleep when there weren’t people around, she’d seen his forehead slipping toward the table a few too many times earlier. It had taken both her and Bryce to convince Chuck to grab a few hours horizontal. Even then, Chuck had only given in because Bryce had threatened to make Sarah sit on him.

Now, four hours later, Chuck stood just inside the room, bright-eyed while the fatigue wore at Sarah with every breath. She’d already deduced that it wasn’t lowered oxygen levels. That only left two options: she’d been working too hard or there was a mild sedative being pumped into the bunker. Probably just enough to keep Chuck calm, she figured, and with three people breathing the air, it had dissipated enough to give him uncharacteristic energy, yet make her and Bryce feel a little lethargic. Well, her, at any rate. Bryce seemed to have just as much energy as usual.

Why the government felt such steps would be necessary, she had no idea. Maybe it was a way to fight off claustrophobia? Except it didn’t seem to be doing much for her own dislike of closed spaces.

She pushed the questions from her mind, as they would only drive her crazy and she had other things to do right now. “C’mon,” she told Chuck, dragging him into the kitchen. “Tai Chi time.”

He eyed her movements. “Sarah, I’m over six feet of pure klutz—”

“Then it’ll be good for you. Just do what I do.”

“The difference is,” Chuck put in dryly, “that you look great doing it, and I’ll look like a drunk Eskimo.”

He kind of did, Sarah thought, though she kept that (and her giggling) to herself as she guided Chuck through the moves she could by now do in her sleep. She’d started doing Tai Chi daily at Harvard, which had always included long days and longer all-nighters. Now it was just second nature, though she’d modified her routine to match Bryce’s.

It took Chuck a couple of minutes to stop feeling self-conscious, apparently, and commit himself to the actions. Sarah watched him out of the corner of her eye. He’d probably never be truly graceful, but as he focused, he seemed to shed a couple layers of clumsiness.

“So, am I supposed to be feeling at one with the universe right now?” he asked.

Sarah smiled. “I never feel at one with the universe.”

“That’s too bad. The universe hates me, and I was hoping you could give it a message for me. Or maybe just the finger.” Since they were standing on one foot, wrists crossed in front of them, Chuck stuck his chin down in the collar of his parka and poked out his lower lip. He looked like an absurdly tall turtle.

“Sorry,” Sarah said. “The universe stopped taking my calls.”

“Uh-huh, sure. You’re probably just saying that so that you don’t have to be my errand girl.” Chuck frowned. “No, that’s not right. Errand…woman? Errand lady?”

“Messenger’s fine,” Sarah said, shifting her weight and pushing outward with her palms.

“Messenger,” Chuck echoed, doing a poor imitation of the same movement. He stumbled sideways a little.

“You okay?”

“Everything except my pride, yep. So what exactly is all of this?” Chuck managed to turn a two-fist side-sweep into a gesture that included the whole Tai Chi routine.

“Tai Chi Quan. Sun style because it was Bryce’s day to pick. He’s traditional.” Sarah broke routine to shoot a grin over her shoulder. “I prefer Yang or Chen because it’s a little faster and just feels more violent.”

Chuck squinted. “You know, I think I picked that up about you.”

“You should probably just be glad it’s not a ‘Pushing Hands’ day.”

“Huh. Probably.”

They fell silent again, Chuck continuing to mimic her. Normally, she would have been annoyed at the break in concentration, but with Chuck, she didn’t mind. He was adorable, frowning intensely as he tried to follow her exactly. She wasn’t sure she’d ever had such an attentive student.

Chuck’s frown deepened into the real thing. He stopped moving.

“What? What is it?” She glanced around immediately for signs of danger. Bryce would have teased her for it, as very little could attack in such a limited space, but she didn’t care. Her reflexes had saved her life too many times for her to ignore them.

“What’d you do to your neck?” Chuck reached forward and gently pulled the back of her parka collar away from the nape of her neck. It was Sarah’s turn to go absolutely still. Chuck didn’t seem to notice. He winced at whatever he saw.

He was also standing close. So incredibly close. She could feel his body heat against her back. And after being cold for so long, it felt divine. But Sarah didn’t let herself lean back. She kept her stance rigid, though she did twist her head around to meet his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve got a really bad rash.” Chuck winced again in sympathy, sucking air through his teeth. “What’d you do?”

What? Why was he asking her anything at all? With him standing so close, she could barely remember her own name—any of them, actually. Did he actually expect her to remember what she might have done to her neck?

Oh, right.

“It’s just my parka.” Carefully, she reached around and pulled the collar away from him. Or tried to. He had a pretty firm grip on it. “It’s new and I didn’t get a chance to break it in. It’s no big deal—ooh.”

He’d poked her. It wasn’t pain—though there was some of that—so much as surprise. She glared. “Don’t do that again.”

“You flinched. It’s hurting you,” Chuck said, ignoring her glare. “C’mon, I’ve got some ointment for that.”

“Chuck, it’s no big deal—”

“Can’t hurt to be safe.” Chuck released her and stepped back. She hid the wave of disappointment under an annoyed look. “It’ll take two minutes, and you can go right back to doing the world’s slowest kung fu routine, I promise.”

“Tai Chi is actually very beneficial for your health,” Sarah said.

“Mm-hmm.” Chuck opened up the cabinet that had been over the table and reached for the top shelf.

“And it’s relaxing, and it helps you clear your mind. It’s a good way to start the day.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“I am. Tai Chi is good for you, et cetera et cetera. I’ll add it to my morning play-list,” Chuck said as he pulled a green tackle box down. He set it on the one free bit of counter space and flipped the catch. “Well, get over here and let me play nurse.”

Sarah didn’t move. Her mind, of course, had flitted through every response to that statement, including the very important, “Oh, so you want to play doctor now? Let me see your stethoscope,” proposal, but one thing occurred to her, and terrified her with its implications. “Chuck, those are your medical supplies. What if you hurt yourself and you’re trapped in the middle of nowhere without supplies because I used them up?”

Chuck had his back to her as he rifled through the kit. “First off, if I’m badly hurt, I doubt a little ointment and gauze is going to do much. And before you worry, Miss Mother Hen, I’ll put in a request for more when I send in my requisitions form, okay? Josh over in Logistics and Supplies owes me more than ointment. Actually, he promised me a Christmas present this year. I’m a little excited. I’m hoping it’s nine ladies dancing rather than just the three French hens.” He grinned, inviting her to share his mirth. She tried to smile back. “C’mon, get over here.”

“Chuck, still, those are your supplies, meant for you. I don’t want to—”

Though she had suspicions that Chuck could move quickly when he wanted to, he advanced on her very slowly, a determined look on his face. “We’ve been over this,” he told her. “C’mon, that rash has to hurt, and I can’t let one of my guests go around in pain.”

“It’s okay, really.”

“I bet you make for a terrible patient at the doctor’s office, too,” Chuck said, still coming toward her.

She refused to back away. It would give him far too much power. So she tilted her chin, folded her arms, and glared, ignoring the fact that the movement made the parka rub against her neck. And his drawing attention to the rash meant that it was bothering her again. Damn it.

When Chuck grabbed her wrist, she gave him the icy look of death, as Bryce had once coined it. Chuck just grinned. “I was right,” he said, and began pulling her toward the counter. “You’re a bad patient. I’m going to have to tie you down, aren’t I?”

Oh, if only.

Sarah shoved all of the X-rated thoughts to the back of her mind, refusing to blush. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Emily Post says so. It’s in her Bunker Etiquette Rulebook, fourth edition.” Chuck smiled at his own humor.

“Yes, because Emily Post has so much to say about neck rashes,” Sarah muttered.

“Chapter three, fourth page, second paragraph. Don’t believe me, look it up. C’mon, take off your jacket. I won’t let you freeze to death, I promise.”

Sarah just scowled at him and peeled off the garment. At least she’d packed her nice long-johns for the trip rather than the ratty ones at the back of her closet, though without the parka, the silk felt all too thin. It was hardly glamorous, though it did cling to her like a second skin. That thought sent sparks of nervousness and guilt up and down her arms. She was probably going to give Chuck a heart attack, given the way he’d been reacting to her all through the visit.

But he just started humming.

Humming.

Okay, maybe no heart attack. She wondered what Chuck was humming. Music really wasn’t her thing.

“Okay,” he said once he’d read through the instructions on the tube and had checked her neck for broken skin. She’d never actually met anybody who read the directions word for word. She wasn’t sure what to think. “So if I’m reading this right, this is going to feel really, really cold or it’s going to sting a little bit. If it’s the former, I’m sorry, and if it’s the latter, I’m really sorry.”

“Just do it,” Sarah said. She tensed.

He was right. It was really, really cold, which contrasted heavily with the fact that Chuck himself burned like a furnace. She could feel his warmth again, much closer now that she had stripped down to her long-johns, and she felt the swirls of delicious heat every time his fingers stroked the back of her neck.

She stayed rigidly still until Chuck taped the gauze into place. “That should help,” he said, patting her shoulder. It was a brotherly gesture, which meant that it shouldn’t have left a fire-burst of heat and made her tingle. “You should probably put your parka back on. You’re shivering.”

She wasn’t sure that was necessarily from the cold, but she donned the garment again, zipping up quickly. She fixed a smile onto her face. “Thanks, Doc.”

“No problem. Just try and keep it clean and dry, and get some more ointment on it when you get back to…” Chuck frowned. “Wherever it is you’re going next.”

And just like that, the proverbial six-hundred pound gorilla lumbered back into the room. As the time for the close of their visit drew nearer, Bryce and Sarah had avoided mentioning leaving. He seemed so happy to have visitors that it killed her a little every time she thought about leaving him behind. Bryce seemed to echo her thoughts, if his similar silence was anything to go by. She imagined that they would just not talk about it at all until she and Bryce were several miles away, but Chuck had now brought it up.

“DC,” she told him, surprising herself. “I’m from the DC area.”

Well, Sarah Walker was from the DC area, at any rate. It was close enough.

Chuck gave her the slow smile, the one that took a few seconds to fully take over his face. “Yeah? That’s home?”

It was _a_ home, so Sarah shrugged. “I’ve got a place there.”

“What’s it like? I haven’t been to DC.” Chuck sounded just a bit wistful. “I’ve always wanted to go see—”

“The Smithsonian?”

“I guess I’m that obvious, huh?”

“Only a little,” Sarah assured him. “If you’re ever in the area, drop by. We’ll have drinks—hopefully no Tang this time—and I can show you around. I haven’t actually gotten to play tourist at all. Might be fun to try. I’ve always been too busy.”

“It’s a date,” Chuck said. Thankfully, he missed the way Sarah jolted because he’d turned away to search through the drawers by the tiny sink. “I think I have something to help with that neck problem of yours. I’m not sure the gauze is thick enough to hold off the parka collar, so…ah, here it is.” He yanked a long strip of pale blue out of the drawer. “Brent left this here, and I really don’t look good in pastels, so…”

Sarah took the scarf warily.

“It’s clean, I promise. I washed it.” Chuck smiled. “It should hold off the rubbing, and even help keep you warm on your trip back. You can just toss it in the trash somewhere when you’re done with it. I’m sorry it’s so cheap.”

“Are you always this nice?” Sarah wanted to ask. People who just gave and gave as Chuck continued to do while she and Bryce stayed with him made her cautious. What did they want? What were they aiming for? Everybody wants something, her father had always told her. The trick with him had always been finding that one thing and exploiting it.

Of course, Sarah was doing the same thing years later, but at least she had questionable legality on her side now.

“Thank you for the scarf,” she told Chuck, shoving the conman’s daughter back into the Sam slot in her brain. She kept her caution out of her smile, which was easy to do when he smiled back.

They heard Bryce’s footsteps approaching from the bunk room. Smoothly, Sarah turned that way as she put the scarf around her neck. Chuck fixed his attention on tidying up the medical kit on the counter, so that when Bryce came in, he found them both at work. He glanced at the medkit and back at Sarah, raising an eyebrow. She merely knotted the scarf and returned the look. “Who was that on the phone?”

“Nobody important.”

A lie. Interesting. Sarah decided that she’d just get a better look at the phone later, while Chuck had Bryce distracted.

Behind her, though, Chuck snorted. “Don’t lie, Bryce.”

He didn’t jolt visibly, but to Sarah, who knew his actions better than her own most of the time, he might as well have. “What?”

Yeah, Sarah thought. What?

“It’s Sheila Rowanson, isn’t it?” Chuck smirked as he closed up the kit. “She’s found a way to stalk you internationally. Don’t deny it.”

Bryce rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “Sheila was not a stalker.”

“Dude, she covered our dorm room door with pictures of herself.”

Sarah tilted her head. “Naked pictures?”

She wasn’t expecting both men to turn confused looks on her, but they did. In fact, the puzzled staring went on long that she wanted to shift her feet. She stayed still. It was a fair question.

“No,” Chuck finally said, his eyebrows knitting together.

“Yeah, too bad she didn’t. Chuck might have actually had to look at nudie pictures of a girl in college, then.”

Chuck threw a dish towel at his friend. “I had a girlfriend, you ass.”

“Seriously, he’s a prude,” Bryce told Sarah, rolling his eyes again. “The other guys would make it a game and leave ‘Penthouse’ magazines all over the house just to see him turn red. Kind of like that, actually.”

Indeed, Chuck did look a bit flushed in the dim lighting. “I had a girlfriend!”

Had, Sarah noted. She cleared her throat. “So because this girl, Sheila Rowanson, covered your door with pictures of herself, she was a stalker?”

“Well,” Chuck said, drawing the word out as he exchanged a look with Bryce. “There was the dead flowers incident.”

“The two a.m. drunk dialing for three months straight,” Bryce countered.

“The time she sang that song she wrote herself to your whole accounting class.”

“God, don’t remind me. Let’s see, she followed us down to San Diego for spring break.”

“The run-in with the Chihuahuas.”

“She threatened to cut three of my Friday night dates.”

“Keyed my car.”

“Keyed Chuck’s car,” Bryce said. “Sorry about that, buddy.”

Chuck shrugged as he mixed up a new gallon of Tang for their morning meal. “I’m over it. It was a crap car.”

Sarah gave them both a puzzled look. “Why would she key Chuck’s car?”

“She thought it was my car. I didn’t want to keep my car on campus, so Chuck and I just both used his. And Sheila…did not take rejection well.” Bryce winced.

“At all.”

“I guess the door covered in pictures is pretty tame, then, all things considered,” Sarah said.

“Well…sort of.” Bryce shuffled his feet as he took a glass from Chuck. “The pictures were from _inside_ our room. While neither of us was there.”

“My teddy bear was never the same again,” Chuck said, his voice solemn.

“This woman sounds crazy. What did you do about it?”

“What any self-respecting pair of college sophomores would do,” Bryce said.

“We bought a dead-bolt and hid under the covers,” Chuck finished. His eyes sparkled. “Sheila was a halfback on the women’s soccer team at Stanford. She could split a man’s skull with her thighs alone.”

“It would probably have been worth it,” Bryce said. He high-fived Chuck and set his glass down on the counter. “Hey, let’s get the table back in here. Got one more surprise for you.”

Though Sarah moved automatically to help Bryce, Chuck beat her to the door and nudged her out of the way. “Guess the womenfolk will see to the food, then,” she said. “Any preference, boys?”

“Whatever’s fine.”

“Just half of one for me,” Chuck said, grunting a little as he and Bryce worked to maneuver the table out of the cramped office.

That worked for Sarah, as she definitely didn’t feel up to eating an entire MRE. She opened up the food cabinet and began rummaging. Bryce could take out an MRE by himself for every meal of every day, given the option. Where the man put it all, she’d never know. He kept his panther-lean build through constant workouts and conditioning, but the man could pack away junk food like nothing else. She looked the wrong way at a donut and she’d have to add an extra mile to her run.

She moved to set the table, but Bryce held up a hand. “Time for the surprise.” He vanished into the bunk room and came back with a small tube.

“Is that—”

“Yep.”

“Holy hell,” Chuck breathed.

As Bryce’s last surprise for Chuck had been picture-cards that had led to a three-hour tournament, Sarah understandably eyed the tube with some trepidation. What sort of nerdish tradition were they about to unleash on her? When the tube revealed a few square feet of a grid and a well-used leather-bound notebook, her suspicion didn’t ease. In fact, it increased at the apparent joy on Chuck’s face.

“ _And_ ,” Bryce said with relish, reaching into his pocket, “I didn’t forget these.” He tossed a velvet pouch on the table. Something metal inside clattered. When the dazed happiness on Chuck’s face only increased, Sarah sighed inwardly. Well, maybe she could read her book.

But Chuck turned a dazzled smile toward both of them, including Sarah in its warmth. “You’re going to love this,” he said, and ducked into the office. He was back in less than thirty seconds clutching a hardbound book. It almost looked like a textbook. “Here, sit, sit. This is going to be amazing, I promise.”

At the men’s insistence, she joined them at the table, digging into her half of the MRE. When she got back to DC, Sarah decided, she was going to treat herself to a nice spring salad and salmon, with something chocolaty for dessert. She honestly didn’t know how Chuck could eat the same thing day in and day out—though she supposed it explained all of the extra padding beneath his parka. High calorie, high protein meals all the time. It was a wonder he wasn’t bulkier.

Bryce put a hand on the leather journal. “This book,” he said, “contains an extensive—”

“But not exhaustive.”

“But not exhaustive accounting of our tales through the Fearsome Forest of Gilder.”

“The Sickly Swamps of Symeria.”

“The Deadly Desert of Despair.”

“The Kingdom of Cortell.”

“And most importantly—”

“The Palace of Pythagorum,” Chuck and Bryce said together.

Sarah looked from one grinning geek to the other and said the only thing that came to mind: “Um, okay.”

Chuck took pity on her first. “It’s our old Dungeons and Dragons campaign from junior year. Our friend Phil was the DM, and he was a creative writing major, so it was always interesting to see what sort of new nightmares could come out of his head every week.”

Sarah, who had no idea what a DM was, said, “Okay.”

“Hey, remember the time he tried to take credit for the hork-bajir?” Bryce asked.

“Ha. Yes. He always was kind of a hack. What’d he call them, again?”

“The Brotherhood of the Heavenly Blades.”

“Ha. Hack,” Chuck repeated. He opened the pouch and a group of multi-sided dice fell into his hand. He jiggled them between his fingers. “I think you’ll like this, Sarah. See, it’s pretty easy to learn—we’ll do a mini-campaign, just play through one of Phil’s old levels. Here, you can be…” He took the journal from Bryce and paged through, still rattling the dice. Sarah was tempted to grab his hand. Also, the noise was putting her on edge.

“You’d make a good rogue,” Chuck said. “Why not take Aeryth?”

“Oh, Aeryth,” Bryce said. “Good choice.”

Sarah, who still had no idea what was going on at all, except she was pretty sure none of those words were actually real, blinked at the sheet of paper Chuck pulled out of the notebook and handed to her. It was columns of different things—STR, DEX, Balance, Bluff, Climb, etc.—and somebody had drawn a pretty realistic woman clutching a crossbow and a rune-etched knife along one free edge. She might have fit in any medieval movie, save the blue hair.

“Becca came up with Aeryth,” Chuck said. “She never finished the campaign—organic chemistry that semester—but she racked up some pretty impressive stats before she had to quit. Bryce?”

“Meat shield!” Bryce crowed, pumping a fist in the air.

Chuck handed over a sheet. “Drago Von Merrekesh’asun, as requested.”

“I’m the guy in the front that gets beat on a lot,” Bryce explained when Sarah gave him yet another confused look. “But I get the cool armor.” He turned his attention to Chuck and pressed the fingers of one hand to his temple while the other hand waved in the air in front of him like a mystic’s. “And you’re going to be…Jon.”

“Aeryth, Drago Von Merrekesh’asun, and Jon?” Sarah asked. She’d finally put it together. Roleplaying. Really? It could get awkward with three of them, unless this was one of those roleplays that didn’t lead to sex. But what was the point of those? So, she wondered, what the hell did Dungeons and Dragons have to do with sex?

Chuck misunderstood her question. “My character’s phenomenal cosmic powers speak for themselves,” he told her, sniffing haughtily. “He doesn’t need an outstanding name.”

“Uh-huh, nice try,” Bryce said. “Now tell her Jon’s full name.”

Chuck sighed. “The Most Noble Sir Jonathan du Mimsel-Poppington Frakes.”

“And we called him?”

Another sigh. “Riker. But his name was _supposed_ to be Jon.”

Sarah waited a beat. “You two do realize that I don’t have the first clue in hell what you’re talking about, don’t you?”

Instead of explaining, however, the man she was sleeping with and the man she was dreaming about sleeping with exchanged a grin. “We’re going to make a lifer out of her,” Bryce said.

“Definitely.” Chuck turned to Sarah. “See, here’s how you play…”

 **19 NOVEMBER 2005  
BUNKER 77142135  
03:17 OMST**

“I don’t understand,” Sarah said for what felt like the fiftieth time since their party—a wizard, a rogue, and a troll, though she had no idea what a rogue actually was—had started exploring the Caves of Calcutta’s Dream.

“There’s a wall here,” Chuck said before Bryce could launch into yet another technical explanation that would have involved words like “hit points” and “stats” and “level.” The men had taken turns handing off the nerd torch, so that Sarah was never sure which one would give her a straight answer. Chuck’s turn now, apparently. “You can’t shoot through a wall.”

Sarah stared at the grid paper on the table. She was the salt packet, she knew, but that was about it. “So how the hell do I know there’s a wall there?”

“Good point.” Chuck pulled a pen out of his pocket.

Bryce grabbed his wrist. “What are you doing?”

“Helping. How’s she going to know there’s a wall there?”

“You’re not drawing on the graph paper, dude.”

“‘Dude,’ it’s really not a big deal.”

“It’s sacred paper.”

“With a sacred nacho cheese stain?” Chuck shook his head. “C’mon, Bryce.”

Sarah recognized the look on her partner’s face. That particular expression meant that she either had to give up or change tactics. So she touched Chuck’s arm. “Um, just point out the wall line, I’ll remember.”

“You sure?”

“Damn near photographic memory,” Sarah said, tapping her temple.

“Okay.” Chuck put the pen away and showed her the wall line. Crisis averted.

Sarah inwardly rolled her eyes, and wished for coffee. She was tired and a nap would be the smart thing to do, but they had to leave in a handful of hours, and no way was she giving up any time with Chuck.

 **19 NOVEMBER 2005  
BUNKER 77142135  
03:59 OMST**

“Can’t we just go around the crystal?” Sarah wondered.

“Crysmal,” Chuck and Bryce corrected her. Bryce went on, “And no, we can’t just go around it, it’s guarding jewels, if I remember right. We have to get them.”

“And carry them how?” Sarah picked up her character sheet, and the sheet of notepaper Chuck had given her for scribbling notes on. So far, it was a mishmash that wouldn’t make sense to her later, but she was proud to have figured out the contents of her pack. “I’m pretty sure that in reality, the Forbidden Shaolin Orb of Elesin actually takes up most of the pack and weighs a ton. Do we really need jewels?”

To her dismay, the guys burst out laughing. What had she said now?

“Try not to take it so literally,” Bryce said. “And we’ve already had points removed from our speed and movement because of the packs. If you like, Chuck, as the DM, could take a couple of points more...”

Sarah frowned. “I’m good, thanks. But after that hit Aeryth took fighting off those baby skeleton whatsits while Drago was busy trying to get himself killed against the copper dragon, shouldn’t we rest or something?”

“Jon healed Aeryth,” Chuck said. “She’s fine.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.” Chuck smiled.

That was awful damn convenient. Maybe she and Bryce should add a wizard healer or mage or whatever it was called to their team. It would certainly have helped her avoid being on medical leave for two months after the fractured ribs, dehydration, and complications. She was going to have to think twice before she let Carina call the mission specs again. Of course, she and Carina were probably banned from working together after that particular disaster in Pakistan, so it wasn’t like she had to worry.

“So,” Bryce said, “let’s go get some jewels, right?”

 **19 NOVEMBER 2005  
BUNKER 77142135  
04:32 OMST**

“I still don’t see how that’s physically possible,” Chuck argued.

“It is,” Sarah and Bryce said.

 **19 NOVEMBER 2005  
BUNKER 77142135  
04:47 OMST**

The die hit the table. “Yes!” Sarah said when it finally stopped rolling. “Ha, take that ‘saving roll for diplomacy!’“

Neither Bryce nor Chuck did the cheering little dance they did whenever a twenty was rolled. Cautious now, Sarah peeked at them from under her eyelashes. Had she done something wrong?

They were staring at the d20 on the table.

Finally, Chuck broke the silence by clearing his throat. “Did she just—”

“Yes. Yes, she did.”

“And was it—”

“The fifth one, yes.”

“In a row?”

“Yes.”

Bryce and Chuck, as one, turned their awed stares toward her. Sarah wondered if she should draw her gun and shoot the pod-people that had replaced her friends. Or was it zombies? They had so many subcategories of things that could go wrong, she couldn’t keep it all straight.

She nearly did draw her gun when Chuck and Bryce, again as one, laid their hands flat and pressed their foreheads to the table. “We are not worthy,” Bryce said.

“Not worthy,” Chuck echoed.

Sarah gave them twenty seconds to return to normal. When neither did, she reached out, grabbed a handful of Bryce’s hair and Chuck’s collar, and hauled. “What the hell are you two on about now?”

“You just rolled a twenty five times in a row,” Bryce said.

“You’re like a goddess.”

Sarah ignored the flush of warmth at Chuck’s open admiration. “I am not. It’s just a matter of odds and I got lucky, that’s all it is.”

“Nope, you’ve officially earned gaming goddess status,” Chuck said. “Can I have your autograph?”

“That’s ridiculous. Cut it out.”

Bryce grinned, leaning back in his chair. He’d tilted his ski cap over his hair at a rakish angle and had spent the game juggling random things inside the bunker, never one to sit still for long unless it was for work. “She’s getting cranky,” he told Chuck. “That either means we should feed her—”

“Not hungry. And sitting right here.”

“Or maybe switch games.”

Sarah was all for that. She’d had fun tromping around as Aeryth, but a couple of hours of understanding maybe a tenth of the conversation had begun to wear on her. So when Chuck took the character sheets and began to lovingly pack everything up, she sighed happily inside. “Something without a crazy name, please,” she said. “My head’s reeling from all of the terminology.”

“Sorry about that.” Chuck flashed her a dazzling grin, just briefly. It was like a blast of heat. “You can take the nerds away from the D and D manual, but then they take damage. We weren’t too much for you, were we?”

They were, but not the way he thought. So Sarah shrugged. “It was educational.”

“Poker?” Bryce offered, pulling the well-used deck toward him. “Watch out for Walker, Chuck. She cheats every chance she gets. Pretty sure she was a card sharp in another life.”

“Oh, trust me,” Chuck groaned. “I know.”

Sarah stuck her tongue out at both of them.

 **19 NOVEMBER 2005  
BUNKER 77142135  
09:37 OMST**

As was inevitable, time flew until they were nose to the nose with the point where Bryce and Sarah would have to leave or miss the rendezvous. About an hour before they were due to leave, Sarah excused herself from the game, giving all of her winnings to Chuck and making Bryce sputter, “Hey!” She claimed she needed a catnap, but the truth was, she just wanted to give the friends some privacy to say good-bye. Bryce never talked much about his family, but whenever he had, his eyes hadn’t lit up the way they did around Chuck.

Brothers, she figured. And she was sleeping with one—sometimes—and dreaming about sleeping with the other. Damn it.

So she lay on the cot, fingers locked together behind her head, and tried not to think. Tried not to wonder why they would pump sedative gas into the bunker, why they would stick Chuck out in the middle of nowhere. She’d tried to broach the subject with Bryce, but he’d just shaken his head and echoed Chuck’s line about mysteries. He’d pulled strings so they could visit Chuck, she knew. Strings that would come back to haunt them, favors they’d both have to repay.

She didn’t mind. Hell, she’d get to use that new bikini some other time. Maybe next year she could call up Carina, and if Carina wasn’t too busy with DEA and other alphabet soup issues, they could have a girls’ week in Aruba or something.

A knock made her crane her neck to look. “It’s open!” she called. Must be Chuck. Bryce was comfortable enough to just walk in.

Sure enough, Chuck poked his head in. “Got a minute?”

“Sure.” She pushed herself up to a sitting position and hugged her knees so that Chuck would have room to sit on the bunk. Otherwise, he’d just hover. The thin mattress dipped a little as he sat. “Where’s Bryce?”

“He’s installing my new satellite phone. Chances are, I’m going to have to reinstall it when he’s done, but he likes to think he’s—”

“Helping,” Sarah said at the same time, and smiled. “Yeah. He’s like that. He set up my entertainment system. I had to call the Nerd Herd to come and fix it. Don’t tell him, though.”

“It’ll be our secret,” Chuck agreed.

That was strange, Sarah thought. Why hadn’t Chuck had a satellite phone before? Wasn’t it pretty much essential when stuck out in the middle of nowhere, alone? What if he had fallen and hurt himself? What if somebody had come to attack him? How on earth was he supposed to receive help all the way out here, all alone?

Chuck cleared his throat and glanced at the wall. Nervous, Sarah thought, her worries shoved back to where she could think about them later. Focus, Walker. She sat up a little straighter. What on earth did he have to be nervous about?

Although that was a little hypocritical on her part, she admitted, as the things wriggling through her midsection could definitely be attributed to nerves.

“I asked Bryce to give us a minute, really,” he said, and licked his lips. “I wanted to say thank you.”

“For what?”

“Bryce told me about Cabo.” Chuck’s eyes met hers and held. He had a way about him of making people feel like they were the center of his universe, Sarah had figured out early on. It was almost spooky. “He also told me about how he dragged you all the way out here without any warning, and even though I really appreciated the company, I’m sorry he did that to you.”

Sarah reached out to touch his shoulder, the closest thing to her, before she really thought about what she was doing. “You don’t need to apologize for Bryce. He’s his own person.”

A small smile twisted half of Chuck’s mouth up. “Old habit. He’s a big personality, and sometimes it’s hard for the rest of us to keep up.”

Old habit? How many times had Chuck apologized for his friend before? And why?

“And I wanted to say thank you for coming, even if it was under hostage circumstances.” Chuck grinned a little at his own joke. “I don’t think I could have had better company than I did. Even if you’re a horrible cheater.”

Sarah shoved him. He teetered sideways, laughing. “It’s okay,” he said. “I forgive you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Even though I know you’d do the same thing all over again, given the chance.”

“In a heartbeat,” Sarah agreed, smiling. Once a conman’s daughter, always a conman’s daughter.

“I know the nerd haze got a little strong,” Chuck went on, his voice apologetic once again.

“It was fine.”

“Your eyes started glazing over during the Magic tournament.”

That was true, but Sarah just smiled and moved a shoulder. She realized belatedly that she still had her palm against Chuck’s bicep, and very casually drew it back. “I had a lot of fun as Aeryth. And ‘Riker’ was such a stand-up guy, always willing to heal anything Aeryth did to herself.”

“Jon,” Chuck stressed. “And it probably would’ve been easier if Aeryth hadn’t insisted on leading with her chin.”

“It’s a nerd’s world. We girls just live in it.”

“Yeah, right.”

Sarah swallowed hard. “Look, Chuck, maybe I should be thanking you.”

But instead of looking confused or openly mocking her, he gave her the easy smile that just seemed to live so naturally on his face. “Yeah? Why’s that?”

Sarah paused. She always chose her words carefully—you never knew when they could come back and bite you in the ass, even from the most innocuous statement. And even if there was something about Chuck that both relaxed and excited her, even if he was the warmest person she’d ever met, at the end of the day, he was still a CIA agent. He still had multiple loyalties. Someday, he might have to burn her. She might have to burn him. So, she had to be careful with what she said now. She opened her mouth, though to say what, she wasn’t sure.

Bryce tapped once on the door jamb, drawing their attention away. He was frowning at his watch. “We’d better move. Storm heading in from the west—if we’re going, we have to go now.”

“Oh.” Chuck seemed to swallow active disappointment as he looked from Bryce to Sarah. “Yeah, I guess you’d better go. Don’t want to get snowbound.”

Even as her mind shuddered at the concept of being trapped in such a tight space under feet and feet of snow, the rest of Sarah could admit that the prospect wasn’t entirely terrible. It was greedy, she knew, but she wanted to stay here in the cold and the dim, all because Chuck smiled at her and that felt nice. It was both the most stressful and the most relaxing vacation she’d ever had.

And when the hell had she turned into a sappy, sentimental freak, again? Maybe they were pumping crazy gas into the bunker as well and she’d sucked up more than her fair share of it.

Bryce grabbed his pack and headed out into the kitchen, tapping his watch as he left. Sarah rolled her eyes at him and pulled her pack from under the cot. She rose just as Chuck stood, and tried to get around her. Except there wasn’t enough room to squeeze by her without an adult content notice. He seemed to realize that; he leaned back against the heat tube door and crossed his arms, watching her pull her cold weather gear from the top pouch of her pack.

“You were going to say something before Bryce came in,” he prompted.

Sarah pulled her facemask on and rolled it down so that it was around her neck. “I wanted to say thank you for being such a good host,” she said, somewhat lamely. She didn’t look up from her pack. “You’re one of the few nice guys left in the world.”

There was a pause, but Sarah, busy pulling on her gloves and snapping her sleeves closed over them, didn’t look over. Finally, Chuck cleared his throat. “I’m not sure that’s a good thing. They say nice guys finish last.”

“Who says it’s a race?”

“Isn’t everything?”

Sarah adjusted her goggles and moved them up to her forehead. It was dark enough in the bunker without them. “Maybe the reason nice guys finish last is because they stopped to enjoy the journey.” She risked sneaking a peek at Chuck as she pulled her snowshoes and ski poles from the bag. He was frowning, but not at her. She turned to zip up her pack.

When she turned back, he had moved so that he was right beside her. She jumped. She hadn’t heard him make a sound. Or had she? Was she suddenly so comfortable around him that she’d stopped cataloguing his every movement? She doubted it.

He picked up one of the snowshoes and hefted it in his palm. “Wow. Lighter than it looks. How fast can you actually go in these things?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never clocked myself, but Bryce would probably know.” Sarah took a deep breath and faced Chuck.

Bad idea. The limited space in the bunk room meant that there was maybe a millimeter of air between them. Just a simple shift in balance would mean no air at all.

Her throat closed. No space. She could feel the walls moving in, the lighting dimming. Twin urges sprang up. Shove Chuck away and gasp in a deep breath. Yank him closer and let neither one of them breathe for quite a long time, possibly hours. Yank him close? Yank him onto the bed, more like it, and finish that damn dream on the beach.

Chuck tossed the snowshoe back onto the bed. “You’ll make good time.”

Get it together, Walker. She forced her mind to focus. “Because my life is a Bond movie?”

“That’s right. C’mon, I’ll walk you out.” He picked up her pack before she could and gestured for her to lead the way. She scrambled to collect snowshoes and ski poles. Like her, Bryce had his mask dangling around his neck and his goggles perched on his forehead. He shouldered his pack as they moved silently to the outer hatch. The air seemed heavier now. Maybe she was projecting, or picking up the heavy thoughts of the man behind her. Telepathy, Chuck had said was the official name for it.

Maybe she’d just spent too much time around nerds. It was more than a possibility.

As she passed the table, Sarah spotted the deck of cards lying on the corner, and brushed her hand over it. She stuck her hand in her pocket and called herself foolish.

Chuck moved past her—a brush of heat—to open the hatch. Sarah noticed that he paused on the threshold, but he took a deep breath and stepped out. He walked them all the way to the end of the tunnel, stopping just as his boot toes touched the edge of the snow. “This is where I leave you. You two sure you’ll be okay out there?”

“Don’t worry, buddy,” Bryce said as he and Sarah sat to don their snowshoes. “I’ve got Sarah. She’s like a blonde good luck charm.”

Sarah rolled her eyes.

“With many other admirable qualities,” Bryce said, hardly missing a beat. He adjusted his goggles, turned to Chuck, and chattered out a random string of syllables. Klingon again, Sarah figured. The nerds had been lapsing into it all throughout their stay in the bunker, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes to talk about her. She probably could have cracked it had she been paying attention, but she had let them have their little code. It was cute, in a way.

She waited while Chuck replied and gave Bryce a hug. A real hug again, Sarah noted. Not one of those handshake-hug hybrids that men claimed were an appropriate greeting or farewell. It made another spurt of guilt shoot through her. She shouldn’t be reacting so strongly to Bryce’s friend when Bryce was the one who had saved her from certain death in the Congo, and Bryce was the one she’d thanked later in the shower.

But her traitorous heart still sped when Chuck let go and turned that slightly sad grin toward her. He held out a hand. “Well, Miss Walker, we’ll have to have a rematch sometime. I’ll bring the cards, as I’m sure your deck will be marked or something.”

“You apparently know me well.” Sarah ignored the outstretched hand and hugged him. Though she felt him tense at first, he returned the hug, even squeezing her ribs a little. She had to let go far too quickly. “Take care of yourself, Q.”

“Watch out for the bad guys, Bristow.”

He kept up the smile, though it wavered as they pulled on face masks, adjusted goggles, gloves, hats, and ski pole straps. One brief look and Sarah and Bryce set out together. A dusting of snow had covered up their tracks from two days before, but Sarah could see the ghostly outlines in the white, leading them back to the sensor. Leading them away.

Had it really only been two days? It felt like a lifetime.

As they struck out, she felt her muscles relax for the first time. Air, blessed, open air. Breathing immediately grew easier. She felt the usual excitement about brisk exercise begin to loosen her muscles as they started to jog. Still, she glanced back, just once.

Chuck, a dwindling figure in the distance, waved.

She waved back.


	4. Keeping the Stars Apart

here is the deepest secret nobody knows  
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud  
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows  
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)  
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart  
\- **ee cummings** , _i carry your heart with me_

 **21 NOVEMBER 2005  
DOMODEDOVO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT  
15:29 YEKT**

“You’re quiet,” Bryce said. When Sarah looked up from her newspaper, he added, “Er. Quieter.”

“Tired.”

“Yeah, I noticed you didn’t sleep well at the hotel last night. Something on your mind?”

Something on her mind? She could say that. She’d been out of that damned bunker longer than she’d been inside it, and Sarah’s mind couldn’t seem to avoid wandering back. She wondered what Chuck was doing. How he was taking being alone again. He hadn’t seemed to have a problem with it, but…didn’t that get lonely? The life of an agent was doomed to be a lonely one, even if you had a partner as great as Bryce Larkin, but this just seemed extreme.

They had avoided mentioning Chuck’s name during their crazy, hodgepodge journey across Russia and Siberia, so much that it had stood between them like an impenetrable wall. So maybe it was time to get a few things out in the open. The Domodedovo Airport was busy enough to cover any conversation, after all. Sarah made a point of folding up the paper and crossing her legs. After four days in ski pants and cold, it felt strange to be wearing a business suit and skirt.

“Why did you really bring me to Siberia, Bryce?” she asked, laying the folded newspaper in her lap. “You could have made that trip to visit Chuck on your own. You knew I’d wanted to go to Cabo and relax, and yet you ambushed me with this trip. I want to know why. And I don’t want a bullshit answer, Bryce.”

“You’re still mad about that?” Bryce frowned. “You seemed to be having a good time.”

“That’s not what I said, and it’s beside the point. I want to know the reason for this trip.”

Bryce hunkered forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Their cover for the trip back from Moscow to DC was as business associates, contractors for a private security firm. Bryce had already shucked his suit jacket, as was habit, and rolled his shirtsleeves up to his elbows. Just add a fedora, Sarah thought as he stared forward, deciding how to answer her question, and he could be a throwback to the days of Sammy, Dean, and Frank.

Throwback or not, he was taking awhile to answer her question. So she nudged him with the toe of her high heel, none too gently. He shot her an aggrieved look. She raised an eyebrow in return.

“I wanted to surprise you back in Washington,” he said, finger-combing his hair back. “After that disaster in Nicaragua, and that little, uh, problem in the Congo, I petitioned Washington for our own dedicated tech backup.”

Sarah tilted her head just a fraction. “We’re dumping Digital Dave?”

“He’s responsible for too many teams, and we’ve almost died because he couldn’t verify the data well enough.” Bryce scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck and looked away. “And here’s the thing. It’s a little unorthodox, but Bunker Seven-Seven-One-Four-Two-One-Three-Five has some of the best connectivity on the planet. Well, for where it is.”

“Bunker…” Sarah trailed off. “What? Where Chuck is? Out in the middle of freaking nowhere?”

“It used to be an OSS/CIA outpost, but it got modified about eighteen months back to be an operational base. They stationed Chuck there because he’s got a good head for tech.”

Sarah shook her head. “But Chuck told me he doesn’t speak a word of Russian.”

“And that’s important because…?”

“He’s in the middle of Siberia, Bryce. They should put somebody who speaks Russian in their Siberian high-tech outpost. It only makes sense.”

“Since when has the government ever made sense?”

A spate of Russian chatter interrupted them; Sarah held up a hand so that she could listen, but it wasn’t their flight being called yet. She leaned back in her seat, crossed her arms, and pinned Bryce with a “Well?” expression.

“Look, the techs that man these outposts, it doesn’t matter if they speak the language. It’s not like Chuck’s going to go out and interact with the natives. He’ll be in this post another year, eighteen months at the most, and then he’ll have served his time with the agency, out of harm’s way.”

Sarah wasn’t sure if she’d rather dodge bullets on a daily basis or be stuck in such a tiny space day in and day out for two to three years, but she was leaning toward the bullets option.

“Then why are they gassing him?” she asked.

Bryce sat up quickly. “What?”

“You didn’t feel it, when we were in the bunker?” Sarah watched her partner closely. “I’m pretty sure they were pumping sedatives into the bunker. You didn’t feel tired, at all?”

“Are you sure it wasn’t your claustrophobia?”

Sarah scowled. “I’m not claustrophobic.”

“Fine.” Bryce held both hands out, an entreaty for peace. “Your dislike of small spaces, then? You sure it wasn’t just that?”

It could have been, but…Sarah shrugged. “Pretty sure it wasn’t.” She hadn’t done as well in the CIA’s Gas and Harmful Substance Detection course as he had, though. “But it could have been, I guess.”

“We’ve been working crazy hours lately. I mean, I’ve been tired, too.” Bryce frowned, but seemed to shrug it off. “Anyway, moving on, I brought up Chuck’s situation to the higher-ups and pointed out that we’d have a much better success rate with dedicated tech support. A compromise was struck.” His grin seemed a little forced when he looked over at her now. “As of thirty-six hours ago, the paperwork cleared, and congratulations, Sarah, we’ve got full, dedicated tech support. Chuck’s the absentee third member of the Larkin-Walker enterprise.”

“Walker-Larkin,” Sarah said automatically, as she always did. Behind the agent mask, her heart gave one huge, absurd bounce, and a feeling flowed through her, like the color slowly returning to the world. It had seemed rather gray and dismal since she’d left the bunker and Chuck behind, but she hadn’t noticed a lack of hue until just this moment. She put a smile on her face that matched what should have been her degree of happiness at finding out that they had dedicated tech support. “That’s fantastic, Bryce. How much access will he have?”

“The works. Digital Dave has a friend over at the NGA, got him set up with a satellite connection, and Chuck’s one of the best hackers you’ll ever meet. His brain is actually like a computer. The way he comes at problems…” Bryce shook his head in sheer admiration. “He’s a genius.”

A genius with a smile warm enough to melt the polar ice caps stuck all by his lonesome in the frostbitten nowhere.

“So I took you out there,” Bryce went on, unaware of her thoughts, “to get the team together. I wanted to introduce the two of you since we’ll all be working together, is all.”

The trip had been for work, Sarah thought. That was a bit…cold, considering that Chuck was literally stranded with no human contact. She almost frowned, until she remembered that Bryce had deliberately lugged along the dice, the old Dungeons & Dragons gear, familiar things that would remind Chuck of home. The reason for the visit had to have at least been two-fold.

“When can we go back?” she asked, keeping her tone neutral.

Bryce gave her a puzzled look. “For?”

“You said he’s a member of our team. I’d like a chance to review his set-up, make sure everything’s okay.”

“I did that.”

“Fine. I’d like to double-check. I’m putting my life in this man’s hands, after all.”

“Sarah.” Bryce paused and slowly sat up. “We can’t go back.”

Sure, the trip out to the bunker had been expensive, but Sarah didn’t mind. She had money. The government paid for all of her meals and accommodations when she was undercover, and she made more than enough yearly to worry about some minor travel expenses. “Why not?”

She almost missed the flinch. It made the cautioning voice in the back of her mind pipe up. Something was definitely up.

Indeed, Bryce cleared his throat twice, a nervous tell (and one she never intended to let him know about, unless it could lead to them getting killed). “Well, we kind of weren’t supposed to go in the first place.”

Uh-oh. “Kind of?” Sarah narrowed her eyes. “I thought you said you pulled some strings.”

“I did. Uh, I just wasn’t expecting them to be attached to…well…some pretty big higher-ups.” Bryce flinched again. “The, er, excrement hit the fan a couple of days ago.”

Sarah quickly flitted through her memory. “The call you got,” she said. “Back in the bunker. That was Washington?”

“A very pissed off Washington,” Bryce confirmed. He didn’t look sheepish, not quite yet, but Sarah could definitely sense something amiss. She braced herself for whatever was coming next. “And the good news is that…well, you got your vacation.”

“Bryce?” Sarah’s tone held just a thin edge of the potential for violence. “What did you do?”

“Well…”

 **14 DECEMBER 2005  
ROCK CREEK PARK, WASHINGTON D.C.  
06:49 EST**

She was going to kill Bryce Larkin.

With every footfall, Sarah repeated the thought. It didn’t matter that it had been over three weeks since she’d actually laid eyes on Bryce, or that he’d apologized sincerely, or that she really didn’t even have a good reason to be mad at him, all things considered. None of that changed anything. She was going to kill Bryce. It wouldn’t even take much. Just a well-practiced flick of the wrist, the quicksilver arc of a blade. A death rattle, a funeral, a star on a wall.

Her revenge would be complete.

She’d thought of about fifty ways to do it. Overt ways, covert ways. Shoot him. Accidentally “slip” and push him off a convenient bridge. Smother him with a pillow. Drop some poison into his martini some night. Take a page out of the Soviet handbook and inject him with a poison pill, just a minuscule pellet with a gooey ricin-flavored center.

She knew that poisoning was stereotypically a woman’s device, but she was pissed, damn it. She wanted Bryce Larkin dead, whatever way she could get it. And she’d prefer it to be as painful as possible.

The problem, she thought as the running path curved and tilted gently upward, making her calves burn, was that Bryce was smart. He’d seen what was coming, and he’d abandoned the field for warmer climes while they both waited for the suspension to be lifted. It was completely unfair. She’d been dragged away from her dreams of Cabo to a bunker in the middle of the coldest country on the planet, dragged away from _that_ far too soon, and now she couldn’t even do her friggin’ job. All because of Bryce’s machinations. And the coward hadn’t even been man enough to stick around through the aftermath.

Oh yes, the aftermath. Bryce knew that Sarah didn’t handle boredom well. On the job, sure, she was fine with it. Being a spy was 97% boredom, 1% adrenaline, and 2% desire to wet your pants from fear or exhilaration. It was outside the spy life that Sarah had trouble. She could handle a week, tops, without starting to slowly go mad.

It had been three. Three damned never-ending weeks.

Sarah was going to shoot something. Preferably Bryce, but by this point, she wasn’t feeling particularly picky. She took the left fork in the running path. Shooting Bryce would mean being put on trial for murder if her license to kill didn’t hold up. Going to prison. Probably getting a little too friendly with other women inmates, a thought that made her shudder.

But at least it would give her something to _do_. She breathed out a puff of steam and considered how she’d go about it.

She was one of few braving the running paths around the park. A cold snap had descended over Washington DC and the Tristate area, which meant even the most hardcore runners had retreated indoors to the safety of the treadmill. She could feel the cold burn down her esophagus like splinters of glass, threatening to rip her innards apart every time she sucked in another biting breath.

It was a welcome distraction.

The other runners on the path looked miserable, huddled in their winter gear, faces reddened by exertion and cold. Sarah nodded as she passed, but she didn’t stop. She didn’t want a distraction taking her away from her current distraction. Every day meant a farther distance, a longer run. She had too much pent-up energy these days, a sort of restlessness that unnerved her because she knew exactly when it had started, even if she didn’t like to acknowledge it. She wished the energy had originated from a different source, a different lust for a different man. Then she could actually _do_ something about it, guilt free, even if he’d headed for the sand and the sun while she froze to death running herself into the ground.

Sometimes, she thought as she hurdled a boulder, rebounding one sneaker off of a tree with a little old-fashioned parkour, life just sucked. She scoffed. Sometimes?

It didn’t help that she didn’t have much to do these days but think. There had been a disconcerting silence from headquarters since their plane had landed in Dulles and she and Bryce had been shipped off to Langley to get their asses handed to them by the bosses. Suspension, reduced pay. A permanent scar on both of their records. Nobody calling her on her cell phone, giving her mission specs, no prepping to go undercover. Just nothing but questionable reality programming and soap operas on TV—honestly, she couldn’t care less about Chris and Sheridan’s romance, as Sheridan would never get over Luis, and they were just characters besides—and running. Lots of running, lots of time in the gym. She could wear her body down, but her mind continued on.

Her watch beeped. Should she listen to it or just keep going? Just keep running on and on—but from what? She was approaching the end of the path. If she kept going, she’d just have to double back to get back to her car. With a sigh, she slowed her pace. Might as well get back to a full day of idleness. Maybe she’d hit the gym later, or a jazz dance class. She didn’t like to go too often as the other women in the class were chatty and wanted to be friends, but by this point in the game, she simply didn’t have a choice.

She made sure to stretch every muscle before she climbed into her car, taking the time to run through the stretches properly. That ate up a good chunk of time.

God, she was bored.

She kept the radio set to NPR as a habit as she was too impatient to actually listen to songs all the way through. Half the time, she tuned out the DJs or whatever they were called. Sometimes, though, they had pretty interesting things to say. On the drive home, Sarah made sure to focus her attention on the topic at hand.

She couldn’t keep letting her mind wander back east.

Though it did. She wondered what he was doing. He was eleven hours ahead of her, which meant it was nearing seven o’clock in the evening for him. Would he be eating dinner? She winced. Another day, another MRE.

Another drink of Tang. Another breath of drugged air?

She found a parking spot mercifully near her apartment and cursed the cold weather for the fifth time that morning. At least it kept the others inside, though the sidewalks were still fairly busy with those brave souls that chose to walk to work even in this cold. She’d found the two-story apartment nestled in one of nicer neighborhoods in Georgetown. The upwardly mobile young crowd, Bryce had decided when he’d helped her move in back in May. She’d tailored her clothing for the area, not that it really mattered. She wasn’t at the apartment much, the last three weeks notwithstanding.

The thing she loved most about her apartment was the small courtyard with its little gate. In the summer, the few times she had been around, the plant-it-and-leave-it-alone garden had been a luxury. She’d indulged herself with nothing more than a lawn-chair and a book, safely hidden off from the rest of the world by a wraparound fence.

Now, halfway up the charmingly uneven sidewalk, she paused. Something felt…off. Had somebody moved the planter on the corner of her front porch? Had it always been in that spot?

“You know,” said a voice behind her, and Sarah very briefly shut her eyes in exasperation, “it’s always the spider plant that gives it away. And that’s really an indoor plant, just so you know.”

“Which is probably why it’s dead,” Sarah said dryly. She turned and leaned back against her apartment wall, her movements very slow and sure. She rolled her eyes to see Bryce holding one of her Smith & Wessons. “I see you found my new stash.”

“Very impressive.” Bryce kept pointing the gun at her. “If I’d actually been out to get you, you’d be dead, Miss Walker.”

Now he shows up, she thought. Good, maybe he’ll do something stupid and I can be justified in killing him. She forced her lips up into a smirk. “If you’d had the balls to pull the trigger before giving away your position, maybe.”

“Balls, Walker?” Bryce laughed, just a small scoffing noise. “I’ll show you balls—”

Sarah’s knife embedded itself into the siding panel a quarter inch from Bryce’s left ear. He jolted. “Gah! I hate it when you do that!”

Sarah used the distraction to snatch her gun away from him and yank the clip out. Empty. She checked the chamber. At least he had the decency not to point a loaded gun in her damned face. “And I’m not real fond of people breaking and entering, but we all have our trials to deal with, don’t we?” She shoved the gun in her waistband.

“You gave me a key.”

“Trust me, right now, I’m thinking of asking you to return it.”

Bryce winced. “Still mad, then?”

Sarah just yanked the knife out of the panel—it proved more difficult than expected—and turned to head into the house.

“Still mad,” Bryce said. “Well, it’s a good thing I got you a Christmas present, then.”

The man was always giving people presents. It probably came from growing up with such a disposable income, but handing out lavish gifts was pretty much just a habit for him. She was a little less than impressed. “How was…where were you this time?”

“Virgin Islands,” Bryce said. “You should’ve come.”

“No thanks.” They’d had their chance in Cabo. Relenting only a little, she flicked a glance back at him as she mounted her front steps. “You look good. Tan.”

“Thanks. You look…buff. You spend this whole time at the gym?” Bryce grabbed her arm.

Sarah nearly twisted and drove his head into the column holding her front porch roof up. It wouldn’t be hard to do. Just a simple shift in balance, the proper application of torque, and Bryce would be suffering from a splitting headache for most of the day. “I haven’t had my coffee,” she warned him, glaring at his hand.

“I made a fresh pot when I got here. Just wanted to let you know before you could go in and start shooting: Digital Dave’s in your home office.”

Aggravation made her wrench her arm out of Bryce’s grip. “For your information, that only happened _one_ time, and Dave forgave me for it a long time ago.”

One of Bryce’s eyebrows went up. “Oh yeah? Which is why he specifically sent me out here to warn you first?”

She opened her mouth to argue that point, but her brain caught up. “Wait a second. What the hell is Digital Dave doing in my apartment, anyway?”

“He’s part of the Christmas present.” Bryce’s grin flashed. “The suspension’s been lifted. We’ve got new orders.”

The very, very tiny part of Sarah that had been worried let out a huge breath of relief. The rest of her squinted at Bryce. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. Dave’s getting a secure line set up with our tech support as we speak. Briefing’s in twenty minutes.”

Their tech support? Chuck, Sarah’s traitorous mind whispered as elation pumped through her. She was back to full agent status with only one disciplinary notice on her record, and in twenty minutes, she’d get to hear Chuck’s voice. Even if it would only be over speaker phone, she couldn’t stop the flood of giddiness.

Sarah Walker, the rational part of her brain chimed in, reduced to a teenage girl with a crush at just the thought of a guy. It was humiliating. What the hell had the world come to?

She didn’t care. She was too excited.

Still, her poker face stayed perfectly set. She smiled for Bryce’s benefit and finally pushed her front door open. “Any idea what the mission is?”

“Not a clue. Just got the orders a couple of hours ago. We’ll be teleconferencing with Chuck and the bosses and we’ll all find out at once, I imagine.”

“Teleconferencing?” Inside her entrance hall, Sarah paused. She glanced down at her running gear. “Video?”

“Yep.”

She swore and raced for the stairs. “Damn it. Be back in ten!”

“Briefing’s at nine! Better hurry!” Bryce sounded like he was laughing as he headed toward her home office.

Sarah was too busy shucking clothing to come back with a biting retort. She jumped into the shower before it had even warmed up, cursing when it froze most of her body. Her hands and feet, still red from the cold outside, started burning as the water warmed, of course, but the rest of her enjoyed it. She ignored that as she washed and rinsed. Did she have time to crimp her hair? Or should she straighten it? Which look was more professional? More importantly, which look would Chuck like more?

Shut up, Walker.

She went with a simple ponytail. After all, the briefing would take place in her home and she didn’t want to stand in her own office, where she usually just lounged in ancient sweats and a tank top, looking like Career Girl Barbie. Even so, picking the proper clothing for the briefing took twice as long as it should have. She rejected three blouses before she settled on a rose silk button up that would go well with a gray skirt. They wouldn’t see her feet, so she didn’t bother with her heels. If Bryce teased her about her shoeless state, she could always just sweetly remind him that he hated it when she wore heels anyway.

Wasting precious time, she took extra care with her makeup and just hoped that Bryce wouldn’t notice. She stepped back and took a critical look at herself. As far as she could tell, there weren’t any red flags that Bryce could catch. Her dress was professional, and she liked girlier colors, as Bryce called them, when she wasn’t on a mission. Nothing to say she’d spent the last few minutes frenzied because of a guy half a world away. Pathetic, utterly pathetic.

Still, she had a calm look in place when she came downstairs. Like her clothing, she’d tailored her apartment to look like any other apartment in the area—nice, middle-of-the-line furniture that was slightly edgy and vaguely modern, coffee-house prints and modern art on the walls. If asked, she could name every artist in the place, but she didn’t really have any strong affinity for any of the artists she’d picked.

Bryce was seated in the breakfast nook when she came into the dining room, a newspaper spread out in front of him. He checked his watch. “You sure you want to come down now? I mean, you’ve got almost four whole minutes to primp. Why waste them?”

Sarah merely picked up the Smith & Wesson he’d left on the counter and gave him a look.

“What?” Bryce asked.

“Did you search my whole place for the fun of it?” Sarah grabbed a mug from its hook on the underside of the cabinet and poured herself the first glorious hit of coffee. “I stashed those things in very specific locations for a purpose, Bryce. Now I’ve got to go around and put everything back.”

“Yeah, we should probably talk about that. I’m a little worried you’re taking the thirty-foot rule a little too much to heart.” Bryce set aside the newspaper.

“It’s my apartment. I’ll hide my damn guns where I want to hide them.”

Bryce eyed her. “Why are you really mad at me?”

“Three weeks, Bryce. Three weeks of nothing to do. And let’s not even forget that lovely six hour chewing out session that we got from Graham.” Sarah glared as she slid away the hidden panel she’d had installed for her second back-up gun. “All of which I didn’t have any choice about because you dragged me to the middle of Siberia without so much as a by-your-leave and then didn’t tell me we’d catch hell for it.”

Bryce sighed. “What do you want me to say, Sarah?”

She didn’t want him to _say_ anything. She wanted those three weeks of her life—of her career, really—back. And half of her wanted to go back in time and just go to Cabo with Bryce and spend her vacation having mindless sex. Because then there wouldn’t be all of these confusing, annoying feelings involved. She wouldn’t feel tugged in half whenever she thought for too long about a man she had no future with, and a partner who was all too willing to move their relationship up to the next level.

If they hadn’t gone to Siberia, she’d be fine with doing that.

But they _had_ gone to Siberia, and she’d met Chuck. And even if part of her wanted to, she couldn’t go back and un-meet him. So now she was stuck with restlessness, loneliness, and an inexplicable guy that wouldn’t stay in a neat slot in her brain where he belonged.

And worst of all, she was being a bitch to her partner. The guy who’d introduced her to Chuck in the first place.

So she sighed. “Nothing.”

“Really? Don’t want to head to the nearest gym and beat the hell out of me?” Bryce folded his arms over his chest, mimicking her stance, and gave her a skeptical look. “As if you could,” he added after a moment.

That made Sarah roll her eyes. “Don’t tempt me.”

“You say the word, and I’ll go back to my place and get my boxing gloves.”

“No, I’m okay. I’ve spent enough time at the gym lately.” Sarah fixed Bryce with her no-nonsense look, the one that had could blister the finish off of a tank at fifty paces. “I want an apology.”

“For?”

“We’ve talked about this. You may think you know best, but if we’re going to keep being partners, Bryce, I want a promise that you won’t do that to me again. I don’t mind the bunker. I had a good time. What I had a problem with was the way you went about it. You can’t keep playing your Machiavellian mind games. If you’re going to do something like that to me again, I want to know everything before we go. Where we’re going, why we’re going, and I sure as hell want to know if it’s going to lead to a three week suspension, got it? If you ever pull this sort of stunt on me again, I will sever your arteries, one by one. Got it?”

Bryce’s face didn’t change, though Sarah fancied he looked a little paler as he nodded. “Okay.”  
“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“Wow,” said a new voice, and both agents looked over to the doorway of Sarah’s office. Digital Dave filled it. He also had both eyebrows practically buried in his hairline as he stared at Sarah. “Remind me to never piss you off.”

“Dave, if you piss me off, next time I shoot at you, I just won’t miss.” Sarah kissed his cheek on the way by. Digital Dave was one of her favorite people in the spy game, even if she didn’t understand half of the gobbledygook he spewed on a regular basis. “How’re the wife and kids?”

“They’re good, they’re good. Josie says hi, since she probably won’t see you at the CIA holiday party.” Dave lumbered into the office behind her and plopped down in the desk chair. His bulky frame dwarfed it, of course. “So I’ve got the set-up all ready to go, just waiting on a response from—oh, there it is.”

The huge TV above the desk had been modified to be used as a computer monitor. Sarah’s heart jolted slightly when half of the screen sprang to life. It was grainy and dark enough that she wanted to squint, but that smiling was face was definitely—

“Chuck!” Bryce, who’d come in behind Dave, grinned for his friend. “How are ya?”

On the screen, Chuck’s smile transformed into a full grin. He held up a hand to tell them to wait, and tapped something on his keyboard. The screen brightened up considerably. “There, that’s better. Can you hear me over there, Dave? Guys?” There was a quarter-second lag between the audio and the visual.

“Coming through loud and clear,” Dave affirmed. “How’s your connection?”

“Ninety-two percent.”

“Really?” Dave’s head shot up. “That high?”

“I…kind of rigged something to amplify the signal.” Though Chuck looked at Dave, he kept sneaking quick grins at Bryce and Sarah. “It’s usually higher, actually.”

“That’s so cool.” Dave sounded like he had a new idol. “Well, just let me bring headquarters up on the line, and then I’ll get out of your hair, as this is way above my pay-grade.” He grunted as he tapped something into the keyboard of Sarah’s computer. A few seconds later, the other half of the TV screen filled with the dour face of Agent Pennyweather, their direct superior. Oh, great, Sarah thought as Digital Dave left them with a nod. We’re going back to the Middle East. Well, at least it would be warmer—assuming they weren’t going into the mountains.

“Agents Larkin, Walker,” Pennyweather said, nodding at each of them. “Agent Bartowski.”

Chuck waved. Sarah looked down to hide a smile; Bryce coughed.

“Shall we begin?” Pennyweather didn’t wait for a response. He launched into a textbook pre-op briefing, detailing their targets and objectives. Knowing that this was likely a test for all three of them and how Bryce, Chuck, and she functioned as a team, Sarah focused all of her attention on Pennyweather’s instructions and diagrams, though a few of Chuck’s questions for the strict mission commander made her cover a smile with her hand. Bryce, likewise, seemed to be coughing a great deal more than normal.

Neither agent could hold it in when Chuck referred to their target as the angry dwarf with the dead eyes and the turban, though. Sarah saw even Pennyweather’s calm façade crack a little, but not out of humor.

She smoothly directed the conversation back to safer ground.

Pennyweather wished them good luck and reminded them about their transport out of Dulles before his half of the screen blinked offline. Bryce moved over to the keyboard, hit a button, and Chuck’s face filled the whole monitor. “Angry dwarf?” he asked as he straightened. “Really?”

“How are you not seeing it?”

“I just don’t—”

“He’s like evil Gimli! Look at this!” Chuck tapped his keyboard, and a picture of their target—who did indeed have dead eyes, Sarah saw—filled the screen. Chuck’s voice still floated through, slightly crunched by static. “He’s all, ‘Grrr, argh!’ You sure you’re gonna be able to handle this guy, Legolas?”

“If I can’t, Arwen can,” Bryce said.

Chuck’s face reappeared back on the screen, but his eyebrows were now low over his eyes. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, really, she can.”

“Not what I meant. I meant, you’re kidding about her being Arwen. She’s clearly Eowyn. Duh, Bryce.”

As one, both men turned to look at Sarah, one in person, one through a computer screen. “Yeah,” Bryce said after a second. “Yeah, I guess so.”

When he turned back to face the computer screen, Sarah made a note to find out who the hell Arwen and Eowyn were, and why the hell she was one and not the other. Just one more thing to be in the dark about when it came to her teammates.

Thankfully, Bryce cleared his throat, ending all nerd-speak. “Now that headquarters isn’t here, I wanted to make sure you’re okay handling all of the assignments.”

Chuck grinned. “It’ll be a cakewalk.”

“You sure?”

“I could do this stuff in my sleep.”

“Awesome. When can you get them to us?”

Sarah stood back while the boys discussed the technical specs. The screen was still a little dark, and grainy, but Chuck still looked the same. Of course, what else had she expected? It had only been three weeks since they’d waved good-bye across the snow. With nothing to do, it had just felt like a hell of a lot longer. Seeing his face now, the way his eyebrows lowered as he answered Bryce’s questions, didn’t deliver the same punch as his physical presence, but her pulse had been a little fluttery ever since the teleconference had started.

Ten minutes into his discussion with Bryce, his eyes flitted up, met hers, and he smiled briefly at her before returning to the problem at hand. She smiled back before she could stop herself.

“Okay, so if you can get the data to me via email within thirty-six hours, I think we’ll be a go for this op.” Bryce glanced down at the PDA he’d been scribing notes on. “Your satellite phone works all right?”

Chuck’s eyes cut to Sarah’s for a brief second of mirth before he nodded. “Got it working.”

“We’ll give you a call when we land in Kabul. You sure that this is all the equipment I’ll need to set up the connection you’ll need to access the security?”

“It’s a quick and dirty fix, but it works, I promise.”

“Fantastic. I’ll—” Bryce’s cell phone buzzed. “Hold on a second, okay?”

“Sure.” The screen jumped and blurred briefly. “I gotta warn you, though, I’m losing connectivity.”

Bryce scowled at his phone. “I have to take this call. I’m sorry, Chuck. Call my sat phone if you have any problems. Sarah can finish out the rest of the stuff with you.”

“Catch you later, Bryce.” Chuck waved as his friend left the room. He turned his smile toward Sarah. “Ha, I thought he’d never leave.”

Her sentiments exactly, though she wasn’t kidding about it like Chuck was. She stepped forward, closer to the screen. As she did so, the screen blurred, jumped, and abruptly cut to black. She was left staring at her own reflection across the black.

Until Chuck’s picture cut back in.

“What’d I do?” Sarah asked, afraid to move lest that set off another glitch.

“You? Nothing. I’m just losing my connection, so we should probably make this quick.” Regret colored Chuck’s tone. Sarah felt a stab of sympathy for him. “Any details that Bryce and I are missing?”

She hadn’t been paying attention, but she was hardly about to admit that. “I think you got everything.”

“Cool. I’ll email the specs to you as well, just in case Bryce needs help setting the tech up.” Chuck’s grin invited her to share in their personal in-joke. “You don’t need anything else, do you? Your personal hacker, at your service.” He gave a little half bow on the screen and flourished his hands so dramatically that she giggled.

She quickly covered her mouth with her hand. “Honestly, I think we’re good. How are you? How have you been?”

Chuck opened his mouth to answer, but she never got to hear it. The screen jittered and danced, Chuck’s image flickering between grainy color and grainy black and white. Though she could see his lips moving, the only audio that came through was static and a weirdly distorted deep sound. Finally, Chuck held up one finger and typed something into his keyboard.

The words “Sorry! Losing connection!” blinked across the screen.

Sarah, unsure what to do, just nodded to show that she understood.

On screen, Chuck typed something. The words disappeared. After a few seconds of lag and a shaking image, new words filled the screen.

Merry Christmas, Sarah.

The last thing she saw before the screen cut to black a final time was Chuck waving with one hand and giving her a thumbs up with the other. She had to laugh, even though the room suddenly felt that much emptier.

She indulged herself for just a moment after the connection had died, just a moment of stillness. A year to eighteen months more in that bunker, all by himself. Even though she’d probably never see him again—after the reprimand she and Bryce had received for going off of the grid so far into Siberia, she doubted she’d ever get permission to visit him in the bunker, and once he was done there, he was probably out of the CIA and wouldn’t want old spies dropping in on his regular life—there had to be something she could do to help him. Unknowingly or not, he’d helped keep her comfortable during her time in the bunker. And she’d been a complete stranger.

There was definitely something she could do to return the favor, so to speak. She picked up her phone from its charging station, and keyed through her contacts list. After a minute, she found the name she wanted. It rang twice before it was picked up. “Logistics and Supplies, Preto here.”

“Josh?” she asked, just to be sure.

“Speaking.” The voice sounded a bit harried. “Who wants to know?”

“It’s Sarah Walker. I had a question for you—”

“Wow, I didn’t think you high-and-mighty operatives deigned to talk to us peasants unless you’re coming in and demanding supplies at the last minute.”

Sarah rolled her eyes. “Do you want me to apologize for the Pakistan thing again?”

“No, just felt like yanking your chain a bit.” Josh’s voice abruptly turned more cheerful. “What can I do you for, Agent Walker? New mission?”

“Well, yes, but Agent Larkin will be contact you about that. I’m calling for…” Sarah took a deep breath. She’d already made the call. No backing out now. “A more personal reason.”

“Yeah? Finally decided to stop resisting the Preto charm? Sweet. I’ll pick you up at seven.”

Since the boys in the home office hitting on her was nothing new, Sarah ignored that. “You’re in charge of sending supplies to Bunker Seven-Seven-One-Four-Two-One-Three-Five, aren’t you?”

She heard paperwork rustle on the other end of the line, and imagined that Josh was checking the messy clipboard that lived in his hand. It grew thicker every year, the papers on the top never changing so that they grew shabbier as time passed. After a few seconds, he said, “Yep, that’s on my list. Wait a second, how do you know that?”

Sarah saw no reason to dispel the commonly-believed myth that field operatives knew all and saw all. “When’s the next shipment going out?”

“Hmm. Today, on the two o’clock flight out of Dulles, it looks like. I was just about to seal it off.”

“Can you add something to it? For me?”

On the other end of the line, Josh sounded a bit puzzled. “You want me to add something to a shipment going to…” Paperwork rustled. “Siberia?”

“Yes.”

“All right, I’ll bite. What do you want me to add?”

“Got any whiskey? The good stuff, not crap.”

“Agent Walker,” and Josh sounded affronted, “this is Supplies and Requisitions for the Central Intelligence Agency. If we had nothing else in our grand, grand store-room, it would be a case of whiskey. What brand?”

“What?”

“What brand whiskey do you want? We’ve got, and this is just off the top of my head, Jameson’s, Wild Turkey, Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark, Rebel Yell—Keith Richards liked that one, you know, so we always keep a bottle around—Jack Daniel’s, Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal—”

“That one,” Sarah said.

“Crown Royal?”

“No, Johnnie Walker. Is it possible to get a bottle of that added to the shipment? You can put it on my tab.”

More paperwork crinkling in the background. It sounded like Josh might be writing something down on that clipboard. “You want to include a note with it or anything?”

Hopefully, the brand would be note enough, so Sarah declined. “Got it,” Josh said after a moment more of scribbling. “Anything else?”

She was about to say no again, but an idea struck her. “Got any comic books?”

“You want me to send a comic book. To Siberia.” It was almost a question.

“Yes.”

“I’m starting to think you’re a very strange woman, Agent Walker, but sure, I can throw a comic book in there. Marvel, DC, Dark Horse?”

“I’m sorry?”

It sounded like Josh might be trying to fight off a headache. “Which comic book should I put in there?”

Oh. This could be a problem. She had no earthly idea what Chuck liked as far as comic books went. She’d tuned out most of the nerd-speak in the bunker for her own sanity. Maybe she shouldn’t do this. Maybe she should just stick with the whiskey. Of course, the pragmatic side of her pointed out, if he didn’t like the book, he could just toss it in the bunker’s incinerator. And if he did, well, that was great, too.

“Dealer’s choice,” she said.

“What?”

“Whichever one you think is best.” After all, Josh Preto was a geek, too. A functioning one, and one that could be quite charming when she wasn’t wreaking havoc on his pristine storeroom, but he’d get Chuck’s interests better than her.

Indeed, he chuckled. “All right. I’ve got the perfect thing in the back. Are you hung up on the comic book idea, or would a graphic novel be okay?”

What the hell was the difference? “Again, you’d know best.”

She hung up a couple of minutes later, took a deep breath, and went to join Bryce in the dining room. He was unrolling a mail tube. “Pennyweather’s messenger just dropped these off, so I thought we’d get started on—what is it?”

Sarah jolted. “What?”

“You’re smiling.”

Was she? It felt like it had been ages since she’d smiled last. At least not since November. Still, she didn’t exactly want to admit to Bryce that a twenty-minute web-cam conversation was the source of her happiness, not when they’d both just had their suspension lifted. “Glad to be back at work,” she said.

“Yeah?” Bryce smiled back. “Me too.”

She helped him spread out the maps for their next assignment across the table. Finally, she thought as they stepped back into the cadence of being Agent Larkin and Agent Walker, life could finally get back to normal.

Well, as normal as you could get when you were Sarah Walker.

 ****

Fin.


End file.
